[Foundation-l] Stroop report

Sun Mar 30 22:28:12 UTC 2008

On Sun, Mar 30, 2008 at 2:58 PM, Yann Forget <yann at forget-me.net> wrote:

> I am talking about cases when the work was published long ago, and the
> author is certainly dead, but the exact fate is not known.
>
> A concrete example can explain that most precisely: the book "La Jeune
> Inde" is a translation of Mohandas K. Gandhi writings published in
> France in 1924. The original texts are from 1919 to 1922, and are
> already in the public domain in USA, and will be in India by 1st January
> 2009, 60 years after Gandhi's death. The translator is Hélène Hart, she
> never wrote nor translated anything else beside this book, and her date
> of death is not known, even to the French National Library (BNF). I
> personaly called the BNF to ask for details. The book was published only
> once in 1924, and is out of print since then. If even the BNF does not
> know anything about Hélène Hart, I doubt anybody else knows it.
>

As a matter of law, the US says you can assume that a work is in the public
domain 120 years after creation (with some exceptions), even if you don't
know the fate of the author.  In other words, since the term of copyright is
life + 70 years, the US presumption is that an author lives up to 50 years
after creating the work unless you can provide evidence to the contrary.
Other jurisdictions probably have their own rules for dealing with unknown
deaths.

That said, just because the BNF doesn't know Ms. Hart's fate doesn't mean
her children or friends don't.  Perhaps she simply changed her name at
marriage and people lost track of her, but that certainly doesn't rule out
the existence of legitimate heirs.

-Robert Rohde