Help talk:Copyright renewals

Maltese Falcon case study
At the time of this post, we attempt to illustrate the nuances of The Maltese Falcon's copyright renewal as follows:

This is a bit misleading.

First, in order to address the issue of renewal, we should take a step back and provide the facts concerning the original first-term copyright registration(s) from 1929.
 * for Dashiell Hammett&#58;
 * None Found; both under the Author's name or the title of the work


 * for Black Mask&#58;
 * [//upload.wikimedia.org/wikisource/en/thumb/0/07/BlackMask_MalteseFalcon.pdf/page1-800px-BlackMask_MalteseFalcon.pdf.jpg Volume 12, Issue 7, September] (right-hand column near the top)
 * [//upload.wikimedia.org/wikisource/en/thumb/0/07/BlackMask_MalteseFalcon.pdf/page2-800px-BlackMask_MalteseFalcon.pdf.jpg Volume 12, Issues 8, 9 & 10, October to December] (left-hand column near the top)

From the above, we can establish a few more "facts" - the most glaring being the lack of a separate registration under Part 1 of the CCE by the contributor/author in 1929 (only the "blanket copyright" for the publisher of the periodical exists and can be found under Part 2 of the CCE). If we dare to extrapolate further, it is safe to assume the work did not have its own separate notice of copyright apart from the publisher's "blanket-copyright" affixed at the time of registration.

That said, we can better revisit the point on 1956-1957 renewals.
 * for Dashiell Hammett&#58;
 * As outlined in the table above at the beginning of this section, specifically
 * 3Dec56, R181617-181619;
 * 4Jan57, R183404.


 * for Black Mask&#58;
 * [//upload.wikimedia.org/wikisource/en/thumb/0/07/BlackMask_MalteseFalcon.pdf/page3-1200px-BlackMask_MalteseFalcon.pdf.jpg Volume 12, Issues 1 to 9 inclusive, months accordingly] (first column, 4th entry down from the top)
 * 9Nov56, R179941-179952;
 * 6Nov57, R202664. (not shown)

Carefully comparing the two, one can see the publisher had renewed the bulk of the 1929 "blanket-copyrights" before the Author did the same.

This means our original observation  means little, if anything at all here, since the publisher a.) owned the first term copyrights to begin with; and b.) properly renewed those 1929 first term copyrights in 1956-57 as well. Further, while the statement  is technically true, it is not the same as renewing a work published as a contribution to a periodical that was separately registered by the author apart from the periodical's "blanket-copyright". In fact, The Maltese Falcon was registered as a book (CCE Part 1) by the [//upload.wikimedia.org/wikisource/en/thumb/0/07/BlackMask_MalteseFalcon.pdf/page4-1200px-BlackMask_MalteseFalcon.pdf.jpg author in February of 1930 (A 18946)]; and that would be the only registration the author would have sole control over. -- George Orwell III (talk) 23:50, 8 February 2013 (UTC)