How does one do a copyright holder search?

[womzilla]

I'm pretty sure there's someone on my flist who knows the answer to this.

Let's say that I'm interested in doing an adaptation of a novel into another medium. The original author is dead and the book is out of print.

How would I go about finding the person who currently owns the copyright? If the work was written before 1977, how can I determine that the work was properly copyrighted at all?

Comments

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

On the second question: Unless I misunderstand, pre-1977, copyright was not granted on publication, but instead on receipt of the proper registration forms. Automatic copyright on publication was the big innovation of the Copyright Act of 1977. Also, before 1998, copyrights required renewal; a lot of early works went into the PD relatively quickly because the renewals were not done. (Pretty much all of Lovecraft and a substantial chunk of Robert E. Howard were in the public domain by the mid-1960s because of the lack of renewal.) So that's what I was referring to as "properly copyrighted".

Without getting into any of the details, I have some reason to believe that the publishers of one of the works in which I am interested would falsely claim that the work was still under copyright even if the renewal had not been done. That was the case with Howard for a long time, after all--Ace had a vested interest in claiming that all the Howard Conan stories were copyright by Conan Properties, even though it was well-known to them that some weren't.

So I was more thinking in terms of how one would go about searching US Copyright Office records for initial registrations and renewals. But certainly contacting the publisher is an excellent starting step.