Are you advocating the denial of earnings to Proust's family? They'll starve without that income, don't you know?

Um, funny, but JK Rowling's works are being published here without their having to be public domain first. Nor is Strange & Norrell public domain yet. So why is that an obstacle for Proust?

Is the real problem that the publisher doesn't think he can make a large enough profit if he has to pay someone for the rights?

Methinks we're only getting a fraction of the story.

My great great grandfather wrote the Hokey Pokey!

Fat city suckers!

I bought them from amazon.co.uk

What do you think the markup on these will be? I"m going to Canada soon and was going to smuggle back some Cuban Cigars.

Boing-Boing should have done just a wee tad of research. Per Wikipedia:

In the United States, the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 extended the duration of U.S. copyrights by 20 years. Before the act, copyrights lasted for the life of the author plus fifty years. After the act, copyrights lasted the life of the author, plus seventy years in the case of individual works, or 75 to 95 years in the case of works of corporate authorship and works first published before January 1, 1978. It also affected works still under copyright that were published prior to this date, increasing their term of protection by 20 years as well. This effectively 'froze' the advancement date of the public domain in the United States for works covered by the older fixed term copyright rules. Under this act, no additional works made in 1923 or after, and that were still in copyright in 1998, will enter the public domain until 2019.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonny_Bono_Copyright_Term_Extension_Act

So it's life plus 70, not life plus 95. So Proust's writings are in the public domain in the U.S.A.

It's still absurd that copyrights should be life plus *anything*; there was nothing wrong with the old 28 years, renewable once, that most of us grew up with.

Hate to be a snob, but if you can't read this work in French, you probably shouldn't read it at all(this is not aimed at you, Brad, because I know you can read it). The only downside is that the french is so beautiful you either have to get through all seven volumes in one shot, or you'll never leave them, because you keep wanting to go back to some point before you left off just to get a running start (my problem for the past 35 years).

Oh, Knut, you're just fuelling the "elite liberal" meme. (Or whatever it is that you do to memes.)

RT, didn't you quote this: "and works first published before January 1, 1978."

That would include Proust, non?

And Knut's right: neither should be be reading "Madame Bovary" or "War and Peace" or "Antigone" in translation. But we do it anyway. Sometimes a cheap knockoff of "Mme Bovary" can be almost as much fun as the real thing, sluts that we are. Slum a little, Knut.

Anderson - you're right, that would include Proust. I overlooked that clause. Good catch. (The 95 years has no connection with the life of the author, but that just means Boing-Boing is right for a different reason than he realized.)

Ahem. "we be."

There was an old saying, attributed to Anatole France, that "Life is too short, Proust is too long." I guess that we should change that to "Life is too short, the U.S. Copyright Law is too long." The meter is off from the original, but the current iteration is probably more accurate.

Random House claims that my Terrence Kilmartin's revision of Scott Moncrief's translation of the Pleiade' edition edited by Andreas Mayor is in fact "at long last, the definitive English version". I certainly hope so, because I doubt I will ever read the whole thing again, no matter how much better the translation might be.

French and English etexts of the Proust novels, including the prodigious C.K. Scott Moncrieff's translation of Albertine disparue (in English titled "The Sweet Cheat Gone"), can be downloaded from Australia at http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/

I do get annoyed at these conversations on the extension of copyrights. No one seems to bother with the international dimension of it. It’s not too much of a stretch to think that maybe, in a digital age, whatever the rules about copyright are, we might actually want them to be the same across different countries?
The European Union harmonised copyrights in the late 1980’s. The UK used to have the same as the US, 50 years after death. Germany had 70 after death. The German system was the one used for the whole EU.
The Sonny Bono Act just brought the US law into line with the European one....as I say, not a bad thing in a connected and digital world. I mean really, half the American left keeps telling us that the USA should be more like Europe, so what’s the problem?

Is this what Social Security Privateers mean when they warn us about the year 2018? That the U.S. economy will be flooded with Proust?

So why can't the publisher negotiate with whomever holds the copyrights?

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