On Oct 7, 6:56 am, OFFICIAL RAM BLUEBOOK VALUATION
wrote:
wrote in message

om

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.

Large publishing concerns have attorneys on staff, who have nothing
else to do, besides this. It takes one about ten minutes to run off a
form letter and send it FedEx to the people involved. It takes even
less to send an email stating that we believe this is inappropriate
use of our IP to someone's ISP. We are talking fifty to a hundred
dollars of company time as internally billed.

Even if the amount is trivial, large publishers, and most small ones,
do the level best they can to stop unauthorized use of any and all
lawful IP. If you in good faith, with an active email address, put up
something not in the public domain it will not be long before you hear
about it.

RDH 4 is absolutely and positively public domain now.

A lot of desireable material isn't and arguably ought to be. I have
of course written my legislators, two of which are neocon fellating
whores and one basically a lazy careerist, so it is a waste of
postage. but what I view as good citizenship on my part.