Funferal

Ulysses out of copyright?

Via Clancy I came across word of an article by Robert Spoo in the Yale Law Review that argues that Ulysses is out of copyright in the United States. The core of the argument seems to be that since Joyce and the publishers of Ulysses did not comply with the then-current requirements for copyrighting the work in the United States the work came into the public domain in the US:

He points out that in a sworn deposition in Paris in a case involving an American publisher who had printed a pirated version of Ulysses in 1926, Joyce was asked if he had ever tried to secure an American copyright. Spoo said Joyce answered under oath that he had not. To me, that was the smoking gun.

Thus, most of the various extensions to copyright terms did not apply to Ulysses. The exception would be those few changes designed to bring public domain works back into the copyright fold. I’ve posted previously about the manner in which Ulysses went out of copyright in Ireland, and then back in. The claim in this paper is that a similar thing happened in the United States for the duration of 1997 and 1998.
Time for a hyper-text version of this multi-layered novel? I’m not the only one to think so.