Re-Publishing An Old Book - Copyright Issues

TommyK

Hello,

I hope this is the most appropriate place to post this . . .

I've come across an old cookbook that I think my customers would like (in electronic form).

However:

1. It was last printed 44 years ago and has, as far as I can tell, been out of print since then.

2. The copyright holder is n Association that ceased to exist approx. 10-20 years ago (my sources differ on exactly when).

Does anyone know what the deal as regards copyright is with a book like this?

If the copyright holder no longer exists, how does one get permission to re-publish!?

Does copyright automatically revert to the individual person who wrote the original work in such a case?

Anyway, if anyone can shed any light on this, I shall cast eternal blessing on you!

Thanks,
Tommy.

antoinolachtnai

TommyK wrote:

Hello,

I hope this is the most appropriate place to post this . . .

I've come across an old cookbook that I think my customers would like (in electronic form).

However:

1. It was last printed 44 years ago and has, as far as I can tell, been out of print since then.

2. The copyright holder is n Association that ceased to exist approx. 10-20 years ago (my sources differ on exactly when).

Does anyone know what the deal as regards copyright is with a book like this?

If the copyright holder no longer exists, how does one get permission to re-publish!?

Does copyright automatically revert to the individual person who wrote the original work in such a case?

Anyway, if anyone can shed any light on this, I shall cast eternal blessing on you!

Thanks,
Tommy.

Is there a copyright notice on it? What does it say?

If the association was dissolved, its assets must have been somehow liquidated and distributed. Someone or some group of people still holds the rights.

It may be that the original author holds the rights, and never really assigned them to the association at all. They might have just 'licensed' them.

I'm not in a position to advise you to do this, but I think a lot of people would probably just make their best endeavours to contact the organization, the author and its successors, create a new edition of the book (with metric, whatever other changes are needed), give credit to the source, keep a keen account on the expenses involved and sort out a settlement if/when someone proves their ownership.

Specky

Unlike patents, trademarks and other more legislatory based protection mechanisms, copyright is an automatic thing.

Any original creation that can be attributed to a person automatically belongs to that person. Like any other posession it remains with them until they die unless the ownership is transfered to another by means of an assignment or sale of ownership.

If the ownership is not transfered before death, then like any other posession, the copyright belongs to the estate of the creator.

So, you need to know who owns the copyright. It is either the author's estate or, possibly, the publisher of the orignal book. If the company has gone out of business then the copyright may have reverted to the original author and later to their estate.

Small works, like quotes or snippets of other people's work generally have very little value and so generally noone will complain too much when you use them as long as you give reference to the original author somewhere in the text.

It's hard to know without seeing the book, but if it was compiled from a variety of sources by the association then the compilation of the work in itself would be copyrighted, with permission being granted by each individual contributor. It could be that the contribution of each individual alone has little or no value and hence the value of the work is in the actual compilation. In that case, if the compiler (the association) has now gone, then the rights to the reproduction of the compiled work may be up for grabs. If it were an "association" as opposed to a company then there probably would be no official disolution resulting in an official division of assets.

If you can prove you have been truly dilligent in your search for an owner of the book's copyright then I'd say that as long as you give full credit to the original authors in your manuscript you should be able to use the material.

You'd need to prove that the individual parts did not subsequently get re-sold to new owners who may be using them in other works, but given that the work has been out of print for so long I'd say you have a good case for claiming that any tenuous ownership issues do not give anyone else a right to prevent you from publishing. Similarly, anyone claiming a royalty from your work might find it difficult since they have made no effort to re-publish the work themselves in such a long time.

It's certainly worth getting a good copyright lawyer to give you the benefit of their experience on this as ownership of collaborative material can often be totally messed up.

Victor

Can a recipe be copyrighted?

Is it possible to revise "thoroughly" such that it is not a copy?

antoinolachtnai

The combination of ingredients and cooking methodsitself wouldn't be protected by copyright, but the expression would. If you revised, then you would be creating a 'derivative work'. If you wrote again from scratch, well, then ...

It is actually more work than it looks to write a decent recipe book! There are hundreds of really duff ones out there, and the newspapers are regularly replete with dodgy recipes.

Specky

Oh I dunno....lots of delicious looking photographs and you're on to a winner. I don't recall ever seeing a cook book that actually told you a reliable way of producing something that looked reasonably close to what's in the picture...not that I spend all that much time drooling over recipe books though...