That’s the title of an article by Stuart Kelley in The Scotsman. It’s worth reading and it goes into some of the interesting copyright issues in Europe. Here’s the beginning:
On 1 January this year, the works of the two most significant modern novelists, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, left copyright and entered the public domain.
It is the second time in my lifetime this has happened. Back in 1992, when I was still a student, Joyce and Woolf left copyright, since at the time, copyright extended to fifty years after the author’s death. Finnegans Wake, beforehand, was only available in the elegant dark-blue edition published by Faber and Faber; Woolf’s Orlando and Mrs Dalloway, likewise, were black-spined Grafton classics.
In 1992, other publishers leapt at the chance to publish the books without having to pay money to the estates of Joyce and Woolf, and, as an emerging bibliophile, I leapt at the chance of having the Penguin Modern Classics editions that now appeared in bookshops. Then they disappeared.
On 29 October 1993, Council Directive 93/98/EEC became law. Under this rule, the copyright laws of the United Kingdom and other members of the European Community were synchronised. While in Britain copyright was limited at 50 years, much of the rest of Europe had fixed it at 70 years. Under the harmonisation of the rules, Joyce and Woolf therefore returned to copyright status. Now that the extra twenty years have elapsed, they are once again back in the public domain. But what that actually means has changed beyond recognition.
Much more in the article. Thanks to Bill Christie for the link.
Yes, notice that harmonization always seems to be used to extend or reinstate copyright and never to release texts into the public domain. Strange how that is.
There’d be nothing wrong with this if the royalties were being used to care for the writer or his/her aged spouse. But life-plus-fifty handled that quite well. Life plus seventy merely pays an unearned bonus to whatever corporate entity happened to pick up the copyright on the cheap and it allows a publisher to keep a classic available only in over-priced editions.
Demonstrating the appalling nonsense of the copyright laws.