Motherboard: “Librarians Are Finding Thousands Of Books No Longer Protected By Copyright Law”

From a Motherboard Report by Claire Woodcock:

Creative works may not have intellectual property protections for a number of reasons. In most cases, the rights have expired or have been forfeited. Basically, no one holds the exclusive rights to these works, meaning that living artists today can sample and build off those works legally without asking anyone’s permission to do so. 

That’s why the New York Public Library (NYPL) has been reviewing the U.S. Copyright Office’s official registration and renewals records for creative works whose copyrights haven’t been renewed, and have thus been overlooked as part of the public domain. 

The books in question were published between 1923 and 1964, before changes to U.S. copyright law removed the requirement for rights holders to renew their copyrights. According to Greg Cram, associate general counsel and director of information policy at NYPL, an initial overview of books published in that period shows that around 65 to 75 percent of rights holders opted not to renew their copyrights. 

“That’s sort of a staggering figure,” Cram told Motherboard. “That’s 25 to 35 percent of books that were renewed, while the rest were not. That’s interesting for me as we think about copyright policy going forward.” 

Cram warns that since the project is still ongoing, the data may ultimately come out to be slightly more or slightly less, and that NYPL hasn’t even begun to dive into films, music, or other types of creative works. But these early findings could help lawmakers craft copyright policies from an evidence-based standpoint that wasn’t easily accessible in the past. 

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Filed under: Data Files, Libraries, News, Public Libraries