welcome to 1922, all over again
While yesterday should have been a joyous day with Little House in the Big Woods entering the public domain; or, indeed, any of Laura Ingalls Wilder's remaining unpublished works (are there any?) entering the public domain for countries honoring the "life plus fifty years" minimum standard of the Berne Convention, here we are once again stuck in a time warp, celebrating Public Domain Day in the same way we've celebrated it since, well, 1922, thanks (in part) to the Sonny Bono Act which added another twenty years to the already extended copyright term of many published works. One can only wonder when/if the United States will follow Mexico's "life plus 100 years" rule.

So yesterday, I wondered about the unpublished Pioneer Girl manuscript, which Roger MacBride registered the copyright for in 1982, 203 sheets, created in 1933, which - interestingly enough - declares that it was written after Little House in the Big Woods was published. Since Pioneer Girl was registered but has not been published that I know of, it doesn't enter the public domain until 2048, if I'm understanding all this correctly.

Then there's the 2001 copyright registration (transfer?) by "Little House Heritage, LLC," "Little House Heritage Florida Intangible Tax Trust," and "Little House Heritage Trust" of 34+ titles, including but not limited to: By the Shores of Silver Lake, Farmer Boy, The First Four Years, Little House in the Big Woods, Little House on the Prairie, The Long Winter, On the Banks of Plum Creek, On the Way Home, These Happy Golden Years, West From Home, The Discovery of Freedom, Diverging Roads, Dorothy Thompson and Rose Wilder Lane: Forty Years of Freedom, Free Land, Give Me Liberty, He Was a Man, The Lady and the Tycoon, Let the Hurricane Roar, The Making of Herbert Hoover, Old Home Town, The Peaks of Shala, Rose Wilder Lane: Her Story (by RWL with RLM), Travels with Zenobia, Young Pioneers, A New Dawn for American: The Libertarian Challenge (MacBride), Bachelor Girl, In the Land of the Big Red Apple, Little Farm in the Ozarks, New Dawn on Rocky Ridge, On the Banks of the Bayou, On the Other Side of the Hill, and Rose Wilder Lane: Her Story (this time by RLM with RWL).

What the heck does this do to the copyright terms of these books, if anything? Do the "Little House" book copyrights still (at the moment, that is) start to expire in 2027? One directs questions pertaining to use of the copyrighted LH book texts to Noel Silverman (www.nls-law.com), in case you're curious.

All I know is that I will be decades older that Laura Ingalls Wilder was when she published her first book, when her first book enters the public domain. I will be lucky to live to see that day... and then I really will celebrate, if I still remember who I am at the time, and I'm not in some home somewhere wondering what would have happened if only Freddy had lived or why nobody plays mad dog anymore.

Labels: laura ingalls wilder

- posted by pioneergirl at 12:36 PM