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Newspaper Strips and why checking their copyright status is so hard

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Yoc:

--- Quote from: John C on August 30, 2012, 03:41:58 PM ---Actually, strips themselves are a pretty serious pain.  Comic books are periodicals, so we can look for issues by year and title.  Comics strips are "contributions to periodicals" (every single installment, by the way), so they're looked up by year and...copyright holder.  Creator?  Artist?  Home newspaper?  Syndicate?  Some homeless dude standing on the streetcorner ranting about the nigh-ness of the end of the world?  Maybe.

And if there's no copyright statement on the script, it's in a bunch of periodicals.  Are any of the newspapers still under copyright?  I don't think anybody has given much thought to whether the paper's copyright would extend to a contribution like that, but I wouldn't bet against it.

Plus, while McNaught isn't around anymore (they folded in the '80s), they handled a lot of high profile properties, like Dear Abby, Dale Carnegie, and Heathcliff, making copyrights likely something they handled well.  That's not definitive, obviously, but the effort involved in the research combined with a probable result makes most strips a low-priority search for us.

--- End quote ---

Anything from before 1923 in the United States is fair game.
-Yoc

John C:
Anything published in the United States before 1923 is fair game.  Overseas, we're still trying to figure out the relevant laws.

Yoc:
Noted.  Thanks John.

chaard:
Copyright laws vary amongst nations, still. Many here may know that in Australia, works are now in the public domain if their author died before 1955. (Thus am I able to slake my thirst for obscure Robert E Howard and HP Lovecraft tales.) Too bad Project Gutenberg Australia down't have a comics section. Too bad DCM doesn't have an Oz branch.

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