Commons:Checking if copyright was renewed
(Redirected from Commons:RENEWAL)
Shortcut: COM:RENEWAL You may have noticed the possibility of US works being in the public domain because their copyright was not renewed in the Hirtle chart.
But how do you verify?
- https://cocatalog.loc.gov/. For example, to check for renewals of Life magazine go to the "Set search limits" page and enter 1950 in the first date field. Enable the "Range" radio button and enter 1951 in the second date field. Select "Serial" for "Item type". (an example of a serial is a magazine) Set these search limits and now search for "life". By default you will search for the title. Copyright numbers that start with "RE" are renewals. For example, RE0000012459 is the copyright number for the renewal of Life. Vol. 10, no. 1, Jan. 1, 1951.
- Go to https://archive.org/details/copyrightrecords and enter your search terms. For example the name of the work, the author or the company the author worked for. Don't forget to select "Text contents" instead of "Metadata"!
Please remember that not finding anything is not an absolute guarantee the copyright was not renewed. But if you have looked well, this is good enough to upload the work to Commons with {{PD-US-not renewed}} tag. Please indicate what you searched for on the file page.