How do international books fit into this?
Lord of the Flies and Tolkien among others are British books. If they enter the public domain in Britain, does that enable Americans to use them even if they are still copyrighted in the US?
Lord of the Flies and Tolkien among others are British books. If they enter the public domain in Britain, does that enable Americans to use them even if they are still copyrighted in the US?
"...the fact that the works of a given author are in the public domain in a jurisdiction does NOT mean (unfortunately) that those works are also public domain in other jurisdictions. If you need to be sure about the status of a given work, check your national copyright law and, if needed, a lawyer.
For 2011, just as an example of how fiendishly complex copyright laws can be, we are told that Isaac Babel, the great Russian author who died in 1940, will NOT enter the public domain in Russia, his home country. In Russia, in fact, the terms of protection of oppressed authors begin with the date of rehabilitation, which for Babel was 1954. Another feature of the Russian copyright law is that the terms of protection of posthumous works start with the date of publication, which means that Bulgakov's masterpiece, "Master and Margarita", first published in 1966 (26 years after Bulgakov's death) in Russia will be under copyright until 2037."
If it is in the public domain in Britain, that doesn't give you a free license to start photocopying the book and reselling it here in the US. Those rights are assigned to a party here in the US. (and thanks to some oddness in the publishing world (or laws that help curb uncompetitive practices, the same company can't own the rights to a work in both the UK and US.)
I don't know enough about this to speculate on your importation and use of a book in the public domain elsewhere. I suspect personal use of the materials is fine. You could likely import a public domain copy of the work from England and as long as you don't adapt, resell, translate or otherwise re-purpose the work you'd be in the clear. I've got a friend who works for a company that does a lot of international rights work in publishing. I'll ask him and post back here, since now I'm curious.
(these sorts of byzantine international arrangements are one of several ways, along with translations, that authors of books have been able to make a reasonable living, selling the rights to the same book several times and being able to quickly drum up a blog post for slow news days with pictures of the Czechoslovakian cover of their most recent book.)