SV: [HPforGrownups] Sorta OT: Re: LOTR Publication history

[heidi]

No: HPFGUIDX 7172

Sorry I'm so late with my response to this:

Peg Kerr wrote:

> Sara Ludwig wrote:
>
> > It may be no error at all. If the copyright rules are still the same as when Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Ring then the author must change some words for the American edition!!
> > catrina
> >
>
> A fuller explanation: From Humphrey Carpenter's _Tolkien: A Biography_ here's a little of the history of that:
>
> Sales of _The Hobbit_ and _The Lord of the Rings_ continued to rise steadily, but there was no drastic change in the pattern until 1965.  Early in that year it was learnt that an
> American publisher who appeared not to suffer from an excess of scruples was planning to issue an unauthorized paperback edition of the _The Lord of the Rings_, almost certainly
> without paying royalties to Tolkien.  Because of the confused state of American copyright at that time, the publisher doubtless thought that he could do this with impunity. . . The
> only way to save the situation was for Tolkien's authorized American publishers, Houghton Mifflin, to issue their own paperback as quickly as possible, and this they planned to do,
> in collaboration with Ballantine Books.  But in order to register this new edition as copyright, they would have to make a number of textual changes so that the book was technically
> "new."
>
> I'm not sure if this "confused state of American copyright" so referenced is the same?  Heidi?

Basically, in 1965, the Copyright Act stated that if a work was
published withouth proper copyright notice, or was published but not
registered, copyright protection didn't vest in the
work (this changed in 1978) so if LOTR was published without proper
notice, it was uncopyrighted, and part of the public domain, the same
way Dickens, Austin and Twain novels are, but
they are public domain because they were published so long ago that
their copyright period has ended. However, by changing portions of the
text, as it seems they did with LOTR, they
created a new work, which was a derivative of the "original" LOTR, and
could obtian a copyright registration for this "derivative" work.
Nothing to do with the americanization of britishisms.