On Tue, 16 Dec 2008 00:53:08 -0500, Michael Black
wrote:

On Mon, 15 Dec 2008, Kenneth P. Stox wrote:

K3HVG wrote:
Tio Pedro wrote:
Apparently Heath has sold the rights to its legacy
equipment, including manual copyrights. All of the
Heathkit equipment manuals are pulled from BAMA
and from several other web resources! This sucks.


Pete


I wonder when the these copyrights will expire? I assume they will?

Not in our lifetimes.

Actually, there seems to have been a period when things could fall out
of copyright. Not the obvious early 1900's, but around fifty years ago.

Jeff Duntemann (who wrote a great article in "73" way back in 1974
about the time he advertised for old electronic junk) wrote about
this on his blog a few months ago,
http://jeff-duntemann.livejournal.com/134918.html

This accounts for that webpage with old technical books on it, they
really do seem to have fallen out of copyright. Jeff mentions books
like Don Stoner's SSB manual that was published by CQ about fifty
years ago, as an example.

Note there is a window when this could happen, and it requires
that nobody renewed the copyright. So it's not automatic.

Michael VE2BVW

In the US and much of the rest of the world, this extended copyright
is a part of the Mickey Mouse legacy. The 1923 date, not
coincidentally is the year that Mortimer Mouse, Disney's first
ancestor to Mickey was created. When the copyrights and renewals for
Disney on Mickey (his first creation) were about to expire a number of
years ago, the US Congress, heeding pleas by Disney that "we don't
want Mickey Mouse's image to end up in the hands of spoofers,
satirists and pornographers" extended the copyright provisions,
provided that the owners extended the copyright by renewal. Active
companies, such as Disney, maintain teams of intellectual property
lawyers to ensure these are renewed. Inactive companies, such as the
various now defunct publishers of these tech manuals have no one with
a vested interest to look over renewals.

Some of this copyright stuff later got extended into international
treaty. I'm am a symphony orchestra violinist in another life, and
most of the music we play written after 1923 is covered by copyright.
Like tech publishing, this was not always the case and some
interesting things happen.

Several of my orchestras play "Peter and the Wolf" by Russian composer
Prokifiev every year at our kiddies concerts. One orchestra bought its
parts during the time it was not under copyright protection. We can
play "Peter" freely and pay no royalty. My other orchestras have to
rent the music (you can no longer buy the parts) and royalty fees
(rather stiff ones) are built into the rental fees.

They upshot of this is that my orchestras are far more reluctant to
play "modern" music. As community orchestras we have limited budgets.
All the players are volunteers. In order to pay for these royalties,
we usually seek out grants, sponsorships and donations when we wish to
perform modern works, on a case by case basis. We give acknowlegement
in the program (this performance was underwritten by the Amalgamated
Tiddley-Winks Corporation).

Music publishers and the various artistic licensing groups (ASCAP,
BMI) charge a sliding scale of royalty fees based upon the orchestra
budget, size of the venue, auditied average attendence, pro or non-pro
etc. etc.

So we can all thank Mickey. Kudos to those firms which own
copyrights, but are willing to grant permission to select groups to
freely provide some of their radio data to websites dedicated to the
boatanchor crew.

Jon

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