IMSLP Forums

IMSLP has three of Charles Wood's string quartets all published by Oxford University Press in 1929. Currently, it shows they won't be PD-US until 2025. I have been unable to locate the original registration for these in the Catalog of Copyright Entries in the late 1920s and early 1930s and cannot find a renewal for it in the volumes from the late 1950s. If this is the case would they not be PD-US? Had they been originally registered would the fact that they were published posthumously have any bearing on US copyright status?

Thanks!
Cypressdome

If you cannot find a renewal in the appropriate volumes of the CCE, and there is no NIE filed in the copyright office's online DB, they can be re-tagged as "C" for the USA.

has this situation changed? the 3 quartets - scores and recordings - that are there seem now to be tagged !N/25/!N (E-flat quartet), !N/25/!N (recording of F major quartet) and V/25/V (score of F major quartet - see here), like situation for the D major quartet as for the F major quartet...
Eric

Yes, the situation has now improved in that we can actually research the renewal status of works published between 1923 and 1949, which was not the case when these were tagged originally. If there were no renewals or NIEs filed, these works are almost certainly public domain in the USA. Oxford is pretty spotty about renewals, especially on the less famous items. (Vaughan Williams was taken care of, naturally). One thing that is sometimes forgotten is that the copyright office actually charged a filing fee for each registration - and a work had to be registered in order to be renewed after 28 years. Some publishers simply did not want to spend the money - which adds up fast when there were thousands of works in the catalogue.