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OFFICIAL RAM BLUEBOOK VALUATION

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Australian law says that when an employee creates a book, the employer
owns it. The term of the copyright for such a corporate copyright
under Australian law is for the *author's life plus 70 years from the
year after his death*. Since first publication was 1953, with revised
and expanded editions following until 1967, the RDH4 cannot even begin
to go out of copyright before at least 2024 and possibly not even
until 2038.

This is such a profoundly stupid complaint you have, Mr. McJute.

Let's assume that the copyright *IS* still owned by RDH4, or whoever you
THINK owns it.

In order to enforce their copyright, they would have to engage in legal
actions. This would normally start with a "cease and desist" letter. For
any publishing company, this would require at least a meeting between
attorney and probably several management level employees, the lawyer would
then go off and research the issue, and write the C&D. This would then be
forwarded back the the client; they would circulate the draft among the
management employees and likely have at least minor changes to the form and
substance of the letter. The attorney would rewrite, and assuming all goes
well receive approval from the client to issue it.

The attorney would then need to locate the exact details of the owner of the
website in question (and from what I gather this material is routinely
available from a number of websites). Research would be done and perhaps at
long last the C&D would be sent, probably by some kind of signed courier.

Total cost? Easily US$5000, perhaps up to US$10,000.

MORE THAN ANY ROYALTIES BEING RECEIVED BY RDH4 FOR THIS COPYRIGHT!

What you don't seem to understand about business, Mr. McJute is that these
kinds of management decisions are made by experienced business people every
day of the week. They are decisions based on sound business practice and
not "vanity". You've clearly published several "vanity" editions of
so-called novels, and rightly believe that you should enforce your copyright
to this drivel. That's your right, and you might actually prevail (there
being no evidence that even with the miniscule cost of digital storage, no
one has yet seen any purpose to steal your vanity books).

There would be no business sense for RDH4 to enforce such a copyright, even
if they are the owner. The demand for these publications is near zero -
they are antiquated reference books at best and I would guess many libraries
that might have a copy would be in the process of getting rid of it, as
libraries routinely do with out-of-date scientific publications.

Many in fact would agree that digital availability for books of this type is
a public service, that these volumes have actually been liberated from their
lack of circulation.

You're apparently one of them anal-retentive troglidytes