1. Unpublished Public Domain Project
I am starting to gather information from archives and libraries on what steps were taken to obtain copyright on unpublished materials created before 1978 that were set to lose copyright on December 31, 2002. (If they were published before that date, they received copyright protection until 2047.) For first time, unpublished works are now part of the public domain under federal copyright. I am interested in three types of activities: traditional edited collections (i.e. the publishing of LETTERS TO A LOST GENERATION before the deadline, for instance); microfilming of unpublished works; and databases and websites of archival or unpublished materials. My interest is in understanding the scope of new public domain material, and how easy it is for scholars to know that these materials are in the public domain. I am also interested in the international aspect of this. I will post what I learn as I go.
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