Posted by John Wilson on May 31, 2017 at 05:03:55 user hugo.
In Reply to: Re: Copyright on AR's works posted by John Wilson on May 31, 2017 at 03:51:45:
The copyright on Arthur Ransome’s works published before 1923 has expired in America. While America now has the "Life + 70y" rule for works published from 1978, his works from 1923 would come under different rules in America (depending on year of publication not of death, and sometimes whether the copyright had been renewed).
Now, the important date is the year of death of the author, and copyright expires 50 or 70 years after death, or rather from the 1st of January of the next year. Hence the period is not affected by the date of death in that year, or the years in which the works were first published. For Ngaio Marsh (died 1982) the copyright period will be the same for her first work (A Man lay Dead, 1934) as for her last (Light Thickens, 1982). Her piece about Roderick Alleyn was probably published before her death so the same rule would apply (though for works published posthumously there are different rules).
Re Ngaio Marsh, she was still producing plays by the Canterbury University Drama Society in the 1960s when I was a student there, and I was in the crowd scenes as a Roman for her last production, of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.
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