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Message: <blockquote data-quote="see" data-source="post: 8565553" data-attributes="member: 10531">Not in any relevant sense for public domain calculations for the next quarter-century.Sure, copyrights since January 1, 1978 have a term of life + 70 years (under the Copyright Act of 1976, as modified by the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998). But every copyright with that term is going to be under copyright through at least 2048 (since a death in 1978+70 years=2048).Stuff that falls into the public domain in the US during the next quarter-century is (with a tiny handful of exceptions, because of course nothing is entirely simple) under extended versions of the pre-1978 fixed-terms-from-date-of-publication rule, which means start of the first calendar year 95 years after publication.(Technically, stuff used to be copyrighted for 28 years with an option to renew to a total of 56 years, which became renew-to- various longer terms as copyright terms were extended, but the law on renewals was changed long enough ago that everything that's entered the public domain for lack of renewal is already there, and everything that got renewed is under the 95-years-from-publication rule. With maybe some minor exceptions I'm forgetting.)Now, there was a weird protectionist technicality in US copyright laws in 1954 that actually dropped The Lord of the Rings into the public domain in the US because the initial US print run was too small to meet demand and the publisher imported too many copies from the UK rather than do a second print run, but copyrights lost for that reason were restored by law in 1996, and accordingly the 95-years-from-publication rule applies. So The Lord of the Rings was published in 1954, and accordingly will be protected until January 1, 2050 (start of the first calendar year 95 years after publication), assuming no term-extension law gets passed.Now, in Canada and New Zealand, the copyright term is the original Berne rule of life of the author + 50, so in Canada and New Zealand all copyrights on Tolkien's published-in-his-lifetime works end on January 1, 2024 (assuming no extension law gets passed), while in Australia, Ireland, and the UK (with the life of the author + 70 rules) they end January 1, 2044 (assuming no further extension laws get passed).(The reason I caveat for term-extension laws but not term-reduction laws is that passing any term-reduction law would violate the Berne Convention, and thanks to provisions in other treaties, put the country in violation of its obligations as a WTO member.)</blockquote>

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