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Comment by ronjouch | Hacker News Reader

What's the copyright situation of this book?

Say I want to restore it, clean it up, and publish a nice epub (using as source the PDF already linked in a comment here). Is it copyright infringement, or is its copyright expired now?

"112 gripes" was published in 1945, thus sites like https://www.biblio.com/blog/2010/07/how-to-determine-if-a-bo... suggest it's expired . But also, it was republished in the US in 2004 (ISBN 1-4191-6512-7). Does this make it "freshly-re-copyrighted until 2004 + 70 years?", or is the year that counts for copyright the original publishing date?

(More general question: how can I check if a book is still copyrighted? Webpages like the one I linked above aren't very precise and leave room for interpretation; is there something easier / more canonical to use?)

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Most US government publications are are public domain: https://www.copyrightlaws.com/copyright-laws-in-u-s-governme...

But determining the copyright status of anything old is really much harder than it should be.

Thanks and thanks for the link; didn't know about this sub-case.

Repeating a point of my original question, in case you have something to say about it: "112 gripes" was published in 1945, thus sites like https://www.biblio.com/blog/2010/07/how-to-determine-if-a-bo... suggest it's expired . But also, it was republished in the US in 2004 (ISBN 1-4191-6512-7). Does this make it "freshly-re-copyrighted until 2004 + 70 years?", or is the year that counts for copyright the original publishing date?

EDIT okay forget about the re-publish question, another HNer commented about it.

> Does this make it "freshly-re-copyrighted until 2004 + 70 years?", or is the year that counts for copyright the original publishing date?

Any changes (spelling, typos, the typesetting) in the new publication would be under a new copyright term. In practice, if you make your copy from the earlier out of copyright edition then you're fine. (Assuming you are correct that the earlier edition is truly out of copyright)

> Assuming you are correct that the earlier edition is truly out of copyright

Given that it is:

- A US Gov document (see other comment about it)

- From 1945 (so, from 1923-1963) and without an explicit Copyright symbol on the document

, I tend to believe so. Maybe I can find not-for-profit lawyer advice to confirm it.

This is incorrect. In the US new copyright is only awarded for acts of authorship. Minor spelling or punctuation changes, or typo fixes, are not authorship. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow

I would be interested in a cleaned up version of this text. If you plan on rewriting the content from the PDF, I can lend a hand !

Sure, thanks! Ping me at ronan foo jouchet bar fr . Will get in touch if I follow-up on making this happen.

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