dilwyn wrote:chriskgnr wrote:Just right now, i read in the link you gave, that "Copyright in a published edition expires 25 years from the end of the year in which the edition was first published."! But this refers for the EU?
I don't know. The link I gave doesn't make it 100% clear. That's why I asked someone to clarify.
UK copyright law has remained the same for many years and is fairly much the same across the world.
1996 saw an extension of the period of protection from life of the author + 50 years (now + 70 years), so works published before 1996 are subject to life of the author + 50 years.
This applies to written works (books, musical compositions, software, plays, magazine articles etc) and works of art.
There is also a specific copyright on sound recordings. This depends on whether it was broadcast or issued as a published edition (ie. was it transmitted by radio or TV waves, or was it published on a record, CD, Video, DVD etc).
If it was transmitted by radio or TV waves then the copyright expires either 50 years from when it was first made, or 50 years from when it was first transmitted (whichever is later - presuming it was still copyright when transmitted). They avoid the term transmission, in case there is another way of publishing a sound recording.
If it was published on a media of some kind (eg record, CD etc), then the copyright expires 25 years after it was first published on that media.
Take the following example: if a band makes a recording in 1960, then it is not transmitted on the radio until 1990 (when found in someone's shed), and released on record in 1992, the copyright in the recording would not expire until 1990 + 50 years (as it was transmitted whilst still subject to copyright).
If the band member who wrote the music dies in 2012, and the band member who wrote the lyrics dies in 2030, then the copyright in the musical composition lasts until 2012 + 50 years, the copyright in the lyrics until 2030 + 50 years.
This is all presuming the copyright is not owned by a corporate entity (as obviously the author may have assigned that right!).
As for QL Books and software - abandonware is a concept dreamt up by internet users who basically think that they should be free to make anything available for free download.
It is up to the copyright authors whether they are willing to take action - although someone in Brazil who publishes a piece of software written in 1984 by a UK software author working from his bedroom, may think it unlikely that they would be sued - you never know - the author can easily contact the website hosting provider and have the website removed for breaching copyright.
Plus quite a lot of copyrights were actually assigned to (or vested in) companies at the time - those companies have now grown up and are in many cases multi-national companies with huge turnover.
You may ask what interest they may have in a bit of software written in the 80s for the QL - well, you never know - look at Elite who published games for the Spectrum and have now acquired the rights and are making £1000s per year selling games to run as downloadable apps.
You may also find that the companies want to protect some of the routines used in the software, which they may still be using today in other software - for example Sage Accounts - I bet that still uses some of the coding techniques written when they launched QL Accounts.
I know that I have continued to use some of the same routines I wrote in the 80s and 90s in software I have produced over the past 2/3 years - maybe not using the same programming language, but using the same logic and techniques to resolve issues which had much more experienced colleagues stumped.
As some on here know, we have had recent experience of someone trying to make QL software freely downloadable and I was not the only copyright holder to force them to remove the downloads. What angered me most about it, was the fact that they go onto forums and then bemoan that they are asked to take down copyright material especially when that copyright is clearly indicated on loading screens, boot programs etc (!) and they even had the cheek to say when they published the programs that they knew that they were copyright but were going to do it anyway !
Until then, i have become stardust! 
Anyway, i think that the real situation is as you described it in the last paragraph. 
