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

[wild-irises.livejournal.com]

Second question first: if it was published, it was almost certainly "properly copyrighted." "Owns the copyright" is a meaningless phrase post-1977; the author always "owns the copyright." ("Holds the copyright" is an almost completely meaningless phrase, because it can mean one of about five different things.)

First question: the author being alive or dead is not relevant. The publisher almost certainly acquired rights in the work ("holds the copyright" in one sense). The odds are good that the publisher acquired the rights "for the full term of copyright and all renewals," so they still hold those rights unless they reverted them. If they hold them, they can sell them, and the author's estate would get half the money. If they reverted them, they should know who they reverted them to, and what the last known address was.

Searching for the author's estate using web resources is another route to the same answer.

[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.

[stevendj.livejournal.com]

http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/renewals.html

[janetmk.livejournal.com]

To find whether a 1923-1977 copyright was renewed, try this search (http://www.scils.rutgers.edu/~lesk/copyrenew.html) of the 1950-1977 renewal notices digitized for Project Gutenberg.

1978 and later copyright records are searchable at the Copyright Office Web page (http://www.copyright.gov/records/index.html); a definitive manual search of earlier records is available for a fee.

[drelmo.livejournal.com]

It's not standard for publishing contracts to have revert clauses (rights revert after n years of being out-of-print)?

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

She did say "so they still hold those rights unless they reverted them". Reversion is not usually automatic--most of the contracts I've seen, the author (or designee) has to request reversion. The condition for granting the reversion can vary.

[drelmo.livejournal.com]

Ah. For some reason, I thought revert clauses were automatic. But of course that doesn't benefit the guy writing the contract.

[richardthe23rd.livejournal.com]

Of course, some publishers will simply insist that the title has never gone out of print, and apparently never will. One artist I know begged all his friends to order his book from The Publisher Who Shall Not Be Named to force them to reply it was no longer available he'd have "proof" it was out of print...