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Originally Posted by Michael Brooke  A lovely thought (and the artwork looks terrific!), but I'm afraid it's a non-starter in reality.
Or at least not as an Indicator box - but the (potentially) good news is that Network has the distribution rights to all these titles courtesy of their recent bulk deal with Hammer, and hopefully they're restoring them properly as we speak.
And as that rather implies, they're definitely not in the public domain. In Europe, this won't be the case for several more decades, and while the US is more of a grey area thanks to their more complicated system of copyright registration, it's by no means clear whether they're public domain there either.
(In the US, you can only be certain of this if the work in question was released or published no later than 1927, which is why there's currently a rather weird situation whereby George Orwell (d. 1950) is in the public domain across Europe, but only his pre-1928 writing is public domain in the US, and unless there's a change in the law in the meantime his writing won't become wholly public domain in the US until 2046.) |
Thanks for the kind words.
Here's hoping that the House of Mouse eventually loses their battle in the US to keep the mouse out of public domain.
And that Network, since they bought the Hammer catalogue, gives some space to the lesser known titles -- it's always the post-1955 titles that get all the attention, which is perfectly understandable but ultimately frustrating for the completists like me.