Err… if the work was originally published in the US, and was published before 1922, it’s public domain. Works that were first published in a foreign country have the copyright status determined by the home country’s laws and various assorted international copyright treaties; it can get complicated.
JRB
I’d like to amend that ever-so-slightly. Frequently an edition of a work that is for the most part in the public domain will still be “copyrighted,” because the publisher will recruit a person of note in the field in question to write a foreword which is appended to the main text specifically for that purpose. I have a copy of Walden in bag for which that is true. You could not quote page after page of the foreword with impunity, but you could do so with what Thoreau wrote.
Your nitpick doesn’t quite work, because your wording "Frequently an edition of a work that is for the most part in the public domain will still be “copyrighted,” is dead wrong. The new foreword can be copyrighted, but the old work itself cannot be. You can check the copyright page and it will say something like, introduction by A. Prominent Professor, copyright 1963. The *edition *is not copyright. This is not a petty distinction; it goes to the core of what is in the public domain and what isn’t.
Hence my putting copyrighted in quotes in the second sentence you quoted. My point is that such a practice may create the mistaken impression that the entire work is under copyright when, in fact, only the least useful part of it is.
Fine, what you meant is correct. What you originally wrote was not.
Never mind legality; if you want your work to be taken seriously as at all scholarly, you need to cite properly. Know when to cite, know how to cite, do it right.
Is that DATE forever firm or is it because it’s 86 or so years ago, with the 86 being operative?
So I could retype and publish a book written in 1901 and try to sell it. Would I even have to retype it or could I make a xerographic copy of it? I’ve seen them. Would I even have to mention the original author or the book’s prior existence?
The date of January 1, 1923 is firm. It has to do with the various changes in copyright law over the years. Anything copyrighted at that point had to have passed into public domain before the law was changed in 1977 (in effect starting on January 1, 1978).
Works published after January 1, 1923 and before 1963 may or may not be public domain, depending on whether the copyright was renewed.
Other works prior to 1977 may be public domain for various technical reasons (the most famous of these was the original Ace US edition of Lord of the Rings, which lost copyright protection due to some technicality over its importation*). So it’s not always clear whether something is copyrighted or not.
As for what you can do with a work that’s public domain – you can do whatever you like with it. Retype it or photocopy it; it doesn’t matter. However, you would have to mention the original author or be considered a plagiarist.
*Tolkien made changes to the text that allowed it to be copyrighted in the US, so it is under copyright now.
I sit corrected.