How copyright law hides work like Zora Neale Hurston’s new book from the public; The Washington Post, May 7, 2018

Ted Genoways, The Washington Post; How copyright law hides work like Zora Neale Hurston’s new book from the public

"Now, according to the Vulture introduction, the Zora Neale Hurston Trust has new representation, interested in getting unpublished works into print and monetizing those archives. That’s great, from a reader’s perspective, but it also reveals a larger problem where scholarship of literature between World War I and II is concerned. It’s mostly due to the Walt Disney Co.’s efforts to protect ownership of a certain cartoon mouse. Over the years, the company has successfully worked to extend copyright restrictions far beyond the limits ever intended by the original authors of America’s intellectual property laws. Under the original Copyright Act of 1790, a work could be protected for 14 years, renewable for another 14-year term if the work’s author was still alive. In time, the maximum copyright grew from 28 years to 56 years and then to 75 years. In 1998, Sonny Bono championed an extension that would protect works created after 1978 for 70 years after the death of the author and the copyright of works created after 1922 to as long as 120 years.


This worked out great for Disney — which, not coincidentally, was founded in 1923 — but less so for the reputations of authors who produced important work between the 1920s and 1950s. Because copyright law became such a tangle, many of these works have truly languished. Here, Hurston is the rule rather than the exception. I have a file that I’ve kept over the years of significant unpublished works by well-known writers from the era: William Faulkner, Langston Hughes, William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, Sherwood Anderson and Weldon Kees, among others. The works aren’t really “lost,” of course, but they are tied up in a legal limbo. Because of the literary reputations of those writers, their unpublished works will eventually see the light of day — whenever their heirs decide that the royalties are spreading a little too thin and there’s money to be made from new works. But other important writers who are little-known or unknown will remain so because they don’t have easily identifiable heirs — or, worse, because self-interested, or even uninterested executors, control their estates."

Librarians stir the pot for copyright reform; Brisbane Times, 7/31/15

Natalie Bochenski, Brisbane Times; Librarians stir the pot for copyright reform:

About 1500 libraries around Australia will on Friday, July 31, take part in ALIA's Cooking for Copyright campaign, with everyone else encouraged to take part as well.

Sue McKerracher, of the Australian Librarian and Information Association, said it was inspired by the thousands of vintage recipes that lay dormant in unpublished library collections.

"What we want is for everyone to cook something, photograph it, and send it to us using the hashtag," she said.

Advertisement "That will effectively give us a good petition to take to the government and ask the Attorney-General to review the legislation, make this change and give a gift to the Australian people."

ALIA has declared Friday, July 31, Cooking for Copyright Day, to draw attention to the quirk of legislation that prohibits unpublished documents from being uploaded online.

"We've got lots of real treasures locked up in museums, libraries, galleries, historical societies that can't be shared online with the Australian public because of this copyright restriction," Ms McKerracher said...

Ms McKerracher said the National Library in Canberra alone held more than two million unpublished works.

"Those include letters from Jane Austen, Prince Albert, Captain Cook, Charles Darwin, Dame Nellie Melba, Christobel Pankhurst and Banjo Patterson, but you wouldn't know that, because we can't put them on the web," she said."