Help talk:Copyright renewals

Maltese Falcon case study

At the time of this post, we attempt to illustrate the nuances of The Maltese Falcon's copyright renewal as follows:

Extract	Text	Notes
	HAMMETT, DASHIELL. The Maltese Falcon. (in Black Mask, Sept.-Dec. 1929) © 12Aug29, B38732; 12Sep29, B41934; 12Oct29, B52499; 12Nov29, B49815. Dashiell Hammett (A); 3Dec56, R181617-181619; 4Jan57, R183404. Red Harvest. © 1Feb29; A7441. Dashiell Hammett (A); 25Sep56; R177772.	The Maltese Falcon and Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett. Both were published in 1929, although The Maltese Falcon was serialised in Black Mask from September to December. Hammett filed the renewals himself. As The Maltese Falcon was serialised, each installment has a separate registration ID and renewal number. The Maltese Falcon is an example of a work published as a contribution to a periodical (the pulp magazine Black Mask).

This is a bit misleading.

First, in order to address the issue of renewal, we should take a step back and provide the facts concerning the original first-term copyright registration(s) from 1929.

for Dashiell Hammett:

• None Found; both under the Author's name or the title of the work

for Black Mask:

• Volume 12, Issue 7, September (right-hand column near the top)
• Volume 12, Issues 8, 9 & 10, October to December (left-hand column near the top)

From the above, we can establish a few more "facts" - the most glaring being the lack of a separate registration under Part 1 of the CCE by the contributor/author in 1929 (only the "blanket copyright" for the publisher of the periodical exists and can be found under Part 2 of the CCE). If we dare to extrapolate further, it is safe to assume the work did not have its own separate notice of copyright apart from the publisher's "blanket-copyright" affixed at the time of registration.

That said, we can better revisit the point on 1956-1957 renewals.

for Dashiell Hammett:

• As outlined in the table above at the beginning of this section, specifically
  • 3Dec56, R181617-181619;
  • 4Jan57, R183404.

for Black Mask:

• Volume 12, Issues 1 to 9 inclusive, months accordingly (first column, 4th entry down from the top)
  • 9Nov56, R179941-179952;
  • 6Nov57, R202664. (not shown)

Carefully comparing the two, one can see the publisher had renewed the bulk of the 1929 "blanket-copyrights" before the Author did the same.

This means our original observation Hammett filed the renewals himself means little, if anything at all here, since the publisher a.) owned the first term copyrights to begin with; and b.) properly renewed those 1929 first term copyrights in 1956-57 as well.

Further, while the statement The Maltese Falcon is an example of a work published as a contribution to a periodical (the pulp magazine Black Mask) is technically true, it is not the same as renewing a work published as a contribution to a periodical that was separately registered by the author apart from the periodical's "blanket-copyright".

In fact, The Maltese Falcon was registered as a book (CCE Part 1) by the author in February of 1930 (A 18946); and that would be the only registration the author would have sole control over. -- George Orwell III (talk) 23:50, 8 February 2013 (UTC)