Book People Archive

Re: Status of LoTR. Public Domain?

Derek Pomery writes:

> This post claims that the text of Lord of The Rings is public domain in
> the U.S. - could someone more familiar with U.S. copyright law weigh in?
> Because if it is, I am going to scan it in at first opportunity.

> http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=55585#post1056112

To the best of my knowledge, early editions of _The Lord of the Rings_
*were* in the public domain in the US at one point, but they aren't any more.

As mentioned in the thread above, Tolkien's works appear to have fallen
into the public domain in the US at one point due to failure to meet
one of the technical requirements of US copyright law.  (According to
Tolkien's letters, this was one of Tolkien's motivations for writing a
revised edition, with new appendices and some changes to the main text.)

However, in 1994 the Uruguay Round of GATT restored the copyright to
many works originally published outside the US that had fallen into the
public domain early due to failure to meet the technical requirements.
The restorations specified in the GATT accord are described in 

   http://www.loc.gov/copyright/circs/circ38b.pdf

and also summarized on my own pages
(such as http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books/renewals.html -- here I talk
about the conditions in terms of exemption from renewal requirements, but
these conditions also apply to exemptions from the other technical
requirements.)

Since Tolkien was a UK citizen, the books were still copyrighted in
the UK at the time of the GATT restorations, and the books appear not
to have been published in the US within 30 days of their publication in
the UK (indeed, that seems to have been part of the reason they'd fallen
into the public domain originally), it appears to me that copyrights
have been restored on these books.  So they're copyrighted, both in the US,
and in every country that adheres to the Berne Convention (i.e. pretty
much everywhere.)  Given the ongoing freeze in US copyrights, they won't
be in the public domain in the US for quite some time to come.

On a related note, a number of copyrights (though not Tolkien's) *did*
expire in various countries outside the US at the start of 2001.
In "life+50 years" countries, such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand,
the copyrights of authors who died in 1950 expired, which is why I was
finally able to list some books by George Orwell that were hosted by
an Australian site.  And in the "life+70 years" countries, such as those
in the EU, the copyrights of authors who died in 1930 re-entered the public
domain, so Sherlock Holmes, for one, can now roam freely on the
fiber-optic streets of London once again.  

John Mark Ockerbloom