Everyone’s writing about this: I want in!

I saw it first on LIS News, which notes that according to the law at the time, copyright for works published in the US between 1923 and 1963 had to be renewed 28 years after publication by the rights holder, or else the work entered the public domain.

Since a lot of rights-holders didn’t get around to submitting the form, a lot of books from those 40 years are presumably free for the usin’, but sadly, there has been no simple way to determine which ones are still under copyright since you’d have had to check with the US Copyright office, and we hate to bother them.

If only this information could be accessed right from this computer or internet-capable mobile device!

Now, thanks to the no doubt painstaking work of one of Google’s software engineers (a shout out to Jarkko Hietaniemi, everyone!), this dream that I only just realized I had is now a reality. Information about the copyright status of 1923-63 works is collected in a single downloadable file which you may access at will!

I think this is pretty cool, even though I’ve only needed this kind of information once and I was able to get it from the still-extant publisher at the time (but you never know!).