If the Guvmint Created It, You Can Use It / Search Engine Optimization for Dummies

because you probably won’t be alive when copyright expires on such works.

(I will. Having done research for a book I’m going to call Live Forever or Die

Tr ying, I’ve learned a few tricks.) Let me just say, by way of example, that the

manages to live to 89, will expire in the year 2118. (No, that’s not a joke.)

The situation for works created before 1978 gets complicated because the

law kept changing and seems to have been intended to confuse. I’m not going

to go into details — it makes my head hurt just to think about. It all depends

on whether you are Uruguayan, are quick on your toes, were 28 on January 1,

1964, and have a Swiss-born mother. However . . .

Anything copyrighted — and by that I mean either published or registered

with the U.S. Copyright Office — after January 1, 1964, is out of bounds for

the foreseeable future (at least until 2059).

Works copyrighted between 1923 (at the time of writing, in 2006) and December

31, 1963, may have lost copyright protection, depending on whether the copy-

right holder renewed it. (In those days, works had to be registered with the U.S.

any point, is no longer necessary.) If it was renewed, the work may still be pro-

tected. Thus most works published between these dates have actually lost

out which works.

If you really want to use a particular work, you can figure all this out. You

need to contact the Copyright Office to see if the work was renewed, though

unfortunately this means you have to do the work yourself at its offices in

Washington, D.C., or pay $75 per hour for a manual search. (See www.

Works copyrighted before 1923 are not copyright protected anymore. You can

take ’em and use ’em for whatever you want.

Does this help you. If you have a site selling cellphones, it almost certainly

does not help you. If you have a site related to Victorian poetry, travelogues,

or herbal medicine, it may be useful. (I have a friend who republishes old

school books, many of which are now copyright free.)

This is a very quick rundown of copyright law, which should be sufficient for

most people’s purposes. However, there are many details I haven’t covered —

titles, short phrases, and slogans can’t be copyrighted, for instance. (Be care-

ful, though — a title can be trademarked. Just try publishing a book with For

Dummies in the title and see what happens!) For the full details, visit the

U.S. Copyright Office Web site: www.copyright.gov. And www.unc.edu/

~unclng/public-d.htm condenses all this complexity into a simple little

chart.

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Search Engine Optimization For Dummies, 2nd Edition