You may remember this post on how a lot of science fiction was showing up in the public domain at Project Gutenberg (which was picked up by SF Signal, Io9, etc.).
Well, Greg Bear and Astrid Anderson Bear, his wife and daughter of Poul Anderson (whose works were among those put up by Project Gutenberg), are saying that Project Gutenberg screwed up:
After conducting legal research on the LEXIS database of legal cases, decisions, and precedents, we have demonstrated conclusively that PG was making incorrect determinations regarding public domain status in many, many works that originally appeared in magazine form. The Poul Anderson estate has been able to get one work, “The Escape”, that PG had firmly declared to be public domain, removed from their site. PG’s original reasoning was that since the magazine it appeared in had never actually filed for copyright, the work was unprotected. “The Escape”, printed in 1953, was the first half of Anderson’s well-known novel BRAINWAVE, which was published and properly copyrighted the following year.
However, even if ‘The Escape” had not been published as a novel, it would have remained under copyright protection until 1981 (28 years) and been eligible for copyright renewal. Authors of that era, and Anderson in particular, were very aware of the need to renew copyrights, and typically meticulously kept their copyright protections up to date. Copyright law for works created more recently is much easier: life plus 70 years. (Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, 1998).
(snip)
In general, Project Gutenberg is doing a tremendous service by making available texts that have truly long since fallen out of copyright, but they are clearly overstepping their original mandate. They are not merely exploiting orphan works, but practicing a wholesale kidnapping of works that are under copyright protection. Authors and estates need to aggressively take back what belongs to them.
I would imagine that Project Gutenberg may very well be hearing not only from the estates of Philip K. Dick and Leigh Brackett, but from lawyers for the still-very-much alive Frederik Pohl, Norman Spinrad and Jack Vance…