Here is a chart, explicitly explaining when items enter the public domain.
Which is to say, everything that I am interested in working with will be available sometime after I am dead.
The work that I would really like to do, work with the collected folktales of the Ozarks, I really can't, unless I track down a copyright holder. Because the people who were telling the stories are, of course, dead, so I can't track them down and ask them to tell me. And besides, the stories are copyrighted by someone else. Frustrating, frustrating.
3 comments:
Interesting. You know, Sarah Fountain from UCA published two collections of Ozark Folktales about twenty or thirty years ago. I think one volume was called Pissin' in the Snow. Seriously.
What do you want to do with the folktales?
That chart, by the way, is demonic.
Pissing in the Snow is a Vance Randolph book. I have it. It, however, is still in print, and is not nearly as cool as Who Blowed up the Churchhouse. (It has a variant of "The Miller's Tale").
I would love to just have an online archive of the Ozarks folktales-- the stuff has fallen out of academic favor, so few people are purchasing the, so they are out of print. So even if someone is interested, they are hard to get (as my ex-library copies attest). I hunt them down periodically on Abe Books or Ex Libris, but I want more.
Really, how do you copyright something that was in the public domain for 500 years? Lomax did the same thing with songs. *sigh*
HA! Okay, this is what happens when I try to remember what the books looked like in the shelves before they became packed in the garage forever.
Next to the Randolph book were two of Sarah Fountain's:
Arkansas Voices: An anthology of Arkansas Literature, and
Authentic Voices: Arkansas Culture 1541-1860
I'm not sure who published the first one, but Authentic Voices was one of the last books published by the old UCA Press.
It's funny how all the WPA Projects (interviews, stories, pictures, recipes) became public domain. Folktales belong to no one.
Bless your heart.
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