How could I find out whether a book... has had its copyright renewed? Is there any method other than paying a copyright search company?First of all, you need to know when renewal matters. In the US, books published before 1964 had to get their copyrights renewed at the Library of Congress Copyright Office in their 28th year, or they'd go into the public domain. Some books originally published outside the US by non-Americans are exempt from this requirement, and in fact some such books had their copyrights restored recently. If you need to know more about the rules for books published outside the US, see this page from the Copyright Office, explaining recent changes in copyright law imposed by GATT. Basically a work is exempt from renewal requirements if all of the following conditions apply:
If you can prove any of these conditions don't apply, and the work was originally published or copyrighted before 1964, then the work had to be renewed in order to stay copyrighted in the US.
Wikipedia has a page on Non-US copyrights that has more information about the details of US copyright restoration from various countries, though I can't vouch for the accuracy of the information there.
Renewed copyrights currently run an additional 67 years (hence, 95 years total), rounded up to the end of the calendar year. So copyrights from before 1930 have now all expired, as of 2025, whether they were renewed or not. Copyrights from 1930 to 1963, if not renewed, and not made exempt from the renewal requirement (see above) have also expired.
There are a few ways to find out whether a copyright was renewed. Some are easier than others; some are more definite in their answers than others.
One easy way to check, sometimes, is just to see if there was any edition published more than 28 years after the original edition, and see if there's a renewal notice in that newer edition. This doesn't always work-- a lot of books simply don't get reprinted-- but if there is such an edition, it can be an easy check to make.
Another way that doesn't involve an exhaustive copyright record search is to write to the author, or their agent or estate, or to the last publisher of the book, and see if they can tell you whether the book's copyright was renewed. Of course, you might not always be able to reach them, and they might not always cooperate, but people on the Net have done this before and found out what they wanted to know. Sometimes, even if the copyright has been renewed, by mailing them you might be able to convince them to let an edition go online anyway.
It's also possible to do a search yourself of the copyright records. For 1978 onward, they're online at the Copyright Office, and below I'll describe how you can search their online records. Copyright records from prior years are now also online in page image form (and sometimes in more convenient form as well).
Copyright records prior to 1978 can also be found in print and microform at the Library of Congress, and at other major libraries around the country, including many Federal Depository Libraries. A few libraries known to have a reasonably full set are the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh, the Free Library of Philadelphia (in microform), the University of Chicago library, and the University of California, Los Angeles.
Since a copyright renewal has to be sometime in the 28th year, you'd look for renewals in the records for the original copyright date plus 27 years and the original date plus 28 years. So if the copyright was originally 1941, you'd look at the volumes for 1968 and 1969 to see if there was a renewal. Occasionally the Library of Congress will be slow in publishing renewals (i.e. some renewals made in December in some years don't actually get published until the following January), so you may have to look in the original copyright date plus 29 years to catch these.
I've done this myself for some books. It's a bit of a cumbersome process-- you have to find the appropriate volumes, and then look up the author and the title-- but it can be done.
Finally, there are also commercial agencies that will also search for you. Their fees may be higher or lower than LOC's, and they might be also able to track down publishers, authors, and heirs for you as well, if needed.
So there are a number of different ways you can go about it, depending on what you're most comfortable with. As I said above, though, if the book is actually out of print and there isn't much in the way of royalties at stake, the original author may well be willing to have an edition go online, whether or not the copyright was renewed, especially if you can show how the online book will give his or her work many more generations of audience.
One important note: remember that if a book contains material previously published elsewhere, that material may still be protected under its own copyright. You can't assume that a book as a whole is in the public domain unless you've determined that the copyrights for the book and for any previously published material included in the book have expired. Note also that materials may not always be in the categories you expect: for example, some pulp fiction "books" were registered as periodicals, and some annual or particularly large "periodicals" were registered as books.
If you simply want to see a book online, and suspect its copyright has expired, you could see if the book has been scanned by a mass digitization service. If it has been scanned, but is not viewable in full, they might be willing to try to clear the book themselves, and turn it on for full view if it appears to be out of copyright. This won't give you a definitive answer on the book's public domain status (since they might be wrong), but it may at least give you full access to the book you want, for little or no cost. Some projects are starting to investigate user-triggered copyright clearance I don't know of any yet that have a formal public mechanism for this, but I will update this page if I hear of any. In the meantime, requests for pre-1964 books that may be out of copyright can be sent to The Online Books Page for public recording, and possible eventual full posting online.
Searching these scans works much like searching the printed volumes as described above. If you're looking for the renewal of a book that was originally published in year X, then you'll need to look for the renewal records in years X+27 and years X+28 (and X+29, if the Copyright Office is running slow). Look up both the title and the authors of the book, in both the January-June sections, and the July-December sections. Also, if portions of the book were originally published elsewhere (such as in a magazine), or includes artwork, there may be separate copyrights for the magazine, earlier book, artwork, or the magazine version of the work. You may therefore have to search renewals in those categories as well.
Using the Copyright Office's online systems, you can find renewals for copyrights from 1951 and later. (Copyrights for 1950 could also be renewed in 1977, so they might not be in the system.) Below I'll describe in detail how to search the database, for those who are interested.
Failure to find a renewal record here does not necessarily mean that the book is in the public domain. Because of changes in copyright law, books published in 1964 or later, and many books that were originally published outside the US by non-American authors, do not have to register or renew in order to be copyrighted. (See above for details.) Also, it's possible for a number of works by a particular author, or published in a particular magazine, to be covered under one blanket copyright that may or may not mention the individual pieces by name. So when researching the copyright for a particular piece, you should know its author and publication history, and use this information in your record searches as well.
You may also want to check with the original author, or their estate or publisher, if you want to avoid possible problems.
Here's a quick, step-by-step version of how to search the copyright listings in the Public Records System, using J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye as an example. Start at the Public Records System home page. You can then look up works by keywords name of author or copyright claimant, title, or other criteria. Results are returned ranked by estimated relevance, and there may be many results returned in a multi-word search, many of which may have little or nothing do with what you're looking for. If you simply type
The Catcher in the Ryeinto the initial search box, without any further information, you will be told there are 50,000 search results (the maximum the system will return). That can easily be overwhelming. When I tried this, the actual renewal record was in the first set of ten results (at number 7), but it might be easy to miss a renewal in this search or other searches that also return large numbers of results. Fortunately, there are ways to make your search more precise, or filter out some of the results after you do your search.
For instance, you can pull down the menu on the search bar to change it from saying "Keyword" to saying "Title". And you can also search
"Catcher in the Rye"enclosed in quotation marks, to make the system search for that phrase, instead of any words in the phrase in any order. Searching this way reduced the results to 148, when I tried it, though the renewal I was seeking was ranked 10th.
Alternatively, we could go to the Advanced Search page to search on both the title and author. If we go to that page, we can pull down the menu under "Field Heading" to say "Title", keep the Search Type "As a Phrase" and then type in
Catcher in the Ryein the search box to the right. (We don't have to include quotation marks on this page, since we're already specifying that we're searching "As a Phrase". Though we can also use them if we want to.)
Before we hit the "Search" button, we can click on the "Add a row" link, which creates a second row of search controls. We'll leave the "Operator" menu on this row saying "AND", because we want to find records that have both "Catcher in the Rye" as a title, and Salinger as an author. We will pull down the "Field Heading" menu to say "All Names", leave the Search type menu "As a Phrase", and then put
Salingerinto the text box on this row. When I click on the Search button, I get 10 results for this search, including the renewal record I'm looking for. (Unfortunately, I don't appear to be able to link to Advanced search results directly, so you'll have to just try it yourself.)
You may have noticed that the "Field Heading" menu also includes "Author" as an option. Why didn't I pick that? I could, but when I tried it I got no results, even though Salinger is the author of The Catcher in the Rye. The reason is that some of the records in this system don't fully record the roles of all the names used in records, and in this case Salinger was recorded as a Claimant of the copyright and not the Author, even though in this case he's actually both. So if you want to be sure to find a record involving an author, it's safest to use a Field Heading that matches any type of name, not just Author.
However many search results we get, we might want to filter down the results so they're easier to go through. On the right hand column of the search results, we see various "Filter" options. One easy filter to apply if we only want to see renewals is under "Registration Class", The "RE" class should apply to any renewal filed in 1978 or later. Clicking on the box by "RE" filters our 148-result basic search down to only 3 records, and filters our 10-result advanced search down to 1 record.
The renewal record we're looking for looks something like this in the search results (though the display is styled somewhat differently there):
| Full Title: The Catcher in the rye. By Jerome David Salinger. | |
| Registration Number: RE0000018341 | Date: 1979-01-22 |
| Type of Work: Text | Claimant: Jerome David Salinger (A) |
| Registration Number / Date | RE0000018341 / 1979-01-22 |
| Renewal Registration for | A00000056070 / 1951-06-11 |
| Type of Work | Text |
| Title | The Catcher in the rye. By Jerome David Salinger. |
| Copyright Claimant | Jerome David Salinger (A) |
| Basis of Claim | New Matter: all matter except two incidents. |
| Names | Salinger, Jerome David 1919- |