How long does a copyright last?

How long can a copyright be extended, and by whom?

• I have in my possession two books. I would like to use short, descriptive passages from both in an electronic publication, which I would sell for a nominal price of $0.99 or $1.99. Case 1: Zanzibar: The Island Metropolis of Eastern Africa, by F. B. Pearce. It was originally published in 1920, in London. The actual book I have is a photographic reprint by http://www.forgottenbooks.org/. They claim a copyright in the book as © 2012 Forgotten Books. On their website they have the following: Copyright of Forgotten Books Site and Content All content on the site including but not limited to text, ebooks, PDFs, images and descriptions is copyright of Forgotten Books. While the original editions of many of these works may be in the public domain, our editions are copyrighted to Forgotten Books. The ebooks may be copied or printed for personal or educational use only. The restricted ebooks may be distributed. None of the ebooks, or any other of our content may be sold individually or as part of a package, modified in any way or reverse engineered. Is this a legitimate claim of copyright? Presumably, Mr. Pearce had copyright at some time, but it probably expired. Does simply rescuing this book from the dustbin of literary obscurity give Forgotten Books copyright? How? Case 2: Zanzibar: Its History and its People, by W. H. Ingrams. This is another photocopy publication. It was first published in 1931 in London. The present copyright is claimed by as © 2007 by Leila Ingrams (who I suspect is a relative of the author.) http://www.stacey-international.co.uk/v1/site/search.asp. I cannot find any copyright policy on their site. Could the author have transferred his copyright to a relative? Can this be done indefinitely, as long as there is an heir who can receive the copyright? I'm assuming I would have to obtain permission from the apparent copyright holders to use material from the book. Or would my project constitute fair use? If so, how much of the content can I use without copyright infringement?

• Answer:

  The claims being made by the Forgotten Books site may well fall under the heading of copyfraud: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyfraud The original text of the book has gone out of copyright. Forgotten Books cannot create a new copyright that covers the words in that original book. It may be that they have a legitimate claim of copyright on the explicit expression of that text - i.e. the typeset image of the physical pages they are selling - unless they have merely copied the original text. If you listen to an audiobook, you will often hear the publisher claim a performance copyright. They are clearly saying that they don't own the copyright to the underlying text, but do claim the right to the spoken performance. For the more specific questions about public domain, I highly encourage you to visit this web page discussing US terms: http://copyright.cornell.edu/resources/publicdomain.cfm This will tell you that a book published in 1931 that was properly registered is very likely still under copyright. And to answer your question, yes, a copyright can be transferred, but that generally does not affect the term. A book published abroad in 1931 will probably be in the public domain 95 years later - 2026. Since you are engaging in a commercial enterprise which may encourage people to sue you, you might want to get real legal help here. If the total amount of money you expect to net would be wiped out by two hours of legal consultation, well, you have to make a hard decision as to whether to trust your own understanding of the law or simply give it up as a bad risk. - Mark