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Phantasmal Site > Innsmouth MUD > Lovecraft Copyright (This document is copied from a page by William Johns on Gizmology.net, now gone) Regarding Copyrights...Copyright law is actually rather convoluted. The following is taken from the U.S. Copyright Office website regarding How Long Copyright Protection Endures.
Since those stories published in 1922 and earlier were no longer under copyright when Public Law 105-298 was passed in 1998, they remain public domain. Regarding his stories published after 1922, S. T. Joshi's biography of Lovecraft contains several very interesting comments (pages 640-641). Joshi concludes that most, if not all, of his works are in the public domain. After Lovecraft's death, his copyrights would have belonged to the only surviving heir appointed in his will of 1912, his Aunt Annie Gamwell. She died four years later, and the copyrights then devolved to two of her descendants, Ethel Phillips Morrish and Edna Lewis. They in turn signed a document (the "Morrish-Lewis gift") allowing Arkham House to publish all his works, but apparently not granting them the copyrights. For a time, Derleth claimed that the copyrights on the anthologies Arkham House published applied to the stories themselves, which is manifestly not the case. The other route by which the copyrights could have been acquired by Arkham House is from Weird Tales. On October 9, 1947, Derleth purchased "all rights" from Weird Tales, but even this is problematic - by April 1926 (and possibly sooner) Lovecraft had been reserving all second printing rights for himself1, so on those stories, Weird Tales didn't own any rights to sell. Of the thirteen stories published in Weird Tales before 1926, seven had already been published in amateur journals, and were thereby in the public domain before Weird Tales printed them; that leaves only six2 that Weird Tales actually owned rights to. However, repeated searches of the Library of Congress have failed to yield any evidence that the copyrights were renewed after 28 years - thereby allowing the stories to fall into the public domain by operation of law. Notes:
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