Help Finding a Story

We can take a look at it... it's the usual problem of getting permission versus items being 'lost' forever... one could argue that from a practical point of view the authors freely published their works on a public forum implying that they'd like to see them read, have since disappeared, so one would imagine probably wouldn't have any objections to us including their stories, even if from a purely 'legal' point of view we've not been granted permission. Then again, we have had a whole pile of unpleasantness from one particular author in the past, three of whose publicly available works we included by accident.

Bottom line, Februs, is you can always take it down if the author objects. But it's largely a matter of policy, not legality. The prospect of being sued for copyright infringement is remote due to the fact that these are largely unregistered works. You can't really do anything about infringement until you have a registration. And to recover statuatory damages and atty fees for past infringement you would have had to register within 90 days of publication. So once you remove it, your liability is extinguished as a practical matter.

Registered vs unregistered copyright depends on the country you are in and what year the story was written/posted. Most of the world has adapted the Berne Convention - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention_for_the_Protection_of_Literary_and_Arti stic_Works for more info on that - and while the US restricts what can be sued for, it recogises that a copyright exists when a work is produced.

Before Berne... It was a mess, a real mess. If you have a few hours to kill, look up the mess about who owns the story Bambi and then there's the debate over if Mickey Mouse is in the public domain (if he was Steamboat Willy he is, otherwise things get complicated).

Now things are simpler. If it was written in Berne adopting country after Berne was adopted - there's a copyright.

Goodgulf

Just a little bit of history, Bambi was written by Felix Salten. I really don't know whether his relatives still collect royalties. I wonder what the copywrite is on this famous childrens story. As some of us know, Salten also wrote anomalously erotic stories. The literary world knows of his writings.

Here's the first link I found while searching....

http://williampatry.blogspot.com/2006/12/bambis-twin-copyright-horrors.html

Spent a couple of hours searching the web and you'll find all the gory details about how Walt spent years working on a movie that he might never have had the rights to. The ordeal is what drove him to the classic (i.e. Public Domain) stories of Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, etc.

Goodgulf