US Catalog of Copyright Entries (Renewals)

US copyright is a complex subject, and is well explained in a recent article by Mary Minow here, and by John Mark Ockerbloom here, with further information here on the rules on works by non-US authors.  In summary:

• if something was published in the US before 1923, its US copyright has definitely expired, even if it was renewed;
• if something was published in the US after 1963, its US copyright is almost certainly extant until at least 2019;
• but if something was published in the US in 1923 thru 1963, its US copyright status depends on whether it had a notice in a legally prescribed way, whether it was registered for copyright, whether its copyright was renewed in a timely manner, the nationality of its creator(s), the dates of death of its creator(s), and the dates of its first publication in the US and abroad.

These pages are intended to help with determining the US copyright status of literary books from this 1923-1963 period.  (Note that the copyright systems of virtually all other countries depend on the date(s) of death of the creator(s) – for help on this, see my New General Catalog of Old Books and Authors.)

These pages currently just contain transcriptions of the renewals of US copyright for literary works, ie books (omitting laws, law reports & digests, instruction manuals, parts lists, instruction papers, maps, forms & patterns), contributions to periodicals & periodicals themselves (omitting law reports & digests), and a few unpublished dramatic (& other performance) works.

NB: I have silently corrected errors where I am sure of the correction, and have indicated others, together with the possible correction, by the use of “[sic]”.  There may be other errors in the printed catalog, and introduced in the transcription, so it is the condition of use of these pages that you must verify any information in these pages before relying on it.  The links to the relevant renewal years for each year of original registration in the table below will take you through to indexes of page images of the printed catalog, and thence to the Project Gutenberg transcriptions of those pages.  There is an overall index here.  If you find any further possible errors, please email me at webmaster@kingkong.demon.co.uk.  (Renewals since 1978 Jan 1, i.e. of material first US-copyrighted since about 1951, can now be searched online – details in the table below.)  For collective works (eg, books of short stories or essays), each item will have a separate copyright status if it was published separately, which will need to be investigated as well.

I have extracted all the declarations of pseudonyms and their resolutions on a separate page here, for those interested specifically in such things.

If the following table is too wide to use conveniently in your browser window,
hit Alt-V, Alt-X, Alt-S in Internet Explorer (Alt-V, Alt-X, Alt-L to reverse),
or Ctrl-Minus in Netscape (Ctrl-Plus to reverse).

The US mirror of this webpage is hosted courtesy of ibiblio.org,
but webmaster@kingkong.demon.co.uk is solely responsible for its contents.