two questions

[tamaranth]

1. Can anyone recommend a good novel about time travel to When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth? The only one I can think of is The Dechronisation of Sam McGruder', but I'm sure there are many many more. (Blame this on Primeval, which missed a trick by not picking up on that aspect of Helen's life.)

2. Am revising Novel #2 and wish to include brief excerpts from a memoir published in 1697. Any idea of the legalities etc?

Comments

[swisstone.livejournal.com]

On point 2, the memoir is surely long out of copyright. There may be copyright in the edition you're using, but that shouldn't affect you. I doubt, for instance, that that nice Mr Stephenson is paying royalties on all the quotations he included.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I don't know your tastes, but I liked Bones of the Earth (www.amazon.com/Bones-Earth-Michael-Swanwick/dp/0380812894) by Michael Swanwick.

[sbisson.livejournal.com]

On dinosaur time travel, there's of course Michael Swanwick's superb Bones of the Earth. Others include Will Hubbell's Cretaceous Sea, Robert Sawyer's End of an Era, and many more.

I'd come up with a longer list, but I'm away from my library at the moment...

[autopope.livejournal.com]

Cryptozoic by Brian Aldiss (though it's a long time since I read it).

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

The text of anything published in 1697 is going to be long out of copyright. (I'm not sure off the top of my head if it would ever really have been copyright in the first place, since copyright as we know it started with the Statute of Anne in 1710 or so.) Quoting it would be no problem, although it is of course polite/good academic practice to give a reference.

The reason I say 'the text of' is that if you republish even an out-of-copyright book then there is copyright in the typographic arrangement of the new edition. So if Fred lays out and publishes a booklet of excerpts from Hamlet and Sue scans it and posts it online, she's infringed Fred's copyright in the layout even though Shakespear's text is public domain. But a scan of an old edition or, as you want to do, simple textual quotation, is fine.

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

Actually, thinking about it, something from 1697 would have been published under an exclusive licence via a bookseller so would have been under a common-law perpetual copyright. What the Statute of Anne did was replace that with a fixed term - originally 14 years.

[drasecretcampus.livejournal.com]

If you were to use a modern edition there might be an argument about transcription and editorial decisions - whether the word is dusty or study, say. As I recall the alternative "corrected" edition of Ulysses was an attempt to gain a copyrighted text as the original edition entered the public domain. The critical opnion seemed to suggest that more decisions were taken to make it more different from any earlier version.

A comparable instance might be the case of the classical music that some professor claimed copyright in the score he had edited for music written by someone else, and thus wanted royalties from Hyperion.

Short extracts should be be fine.

[reddragdiva]

If there's a copy on Project Gutenberg, use that one?