(2019-08-05) 80 Percent Of Books Published 1924-63 Never Had Their Copyrights Renewed And Are Now In The Public Domain

Secretly Public-Domain reveals that 80% of books published 1924-63 never had their copyrights renewed and are now in the public domain.

The problem has been to figure out which of these works were in the public domain, because the US Copyright Office's records were not organized in a way that made it possible to easily cross-check a work with its registration and renewal.

the New York Public Library, which employed a group of people to encode all these records in XML, making them amenable to automated data-mining.

Now, Leonard Richardson has done the magic data-mining work to affirmatively determine which of the 1924-63 books are in the public domain, which turns out to be 80% of those books.

I had no choice but to create a bot. Here's Secretly Public Domain, which highlights unrenewed works that have already been scanned for Hathi Trust.