Conan in the Public Domain

[S'mon]

Found this interesting article on what REH works are in the public domain -as with HP Lovecraft, almost everything published during his lifetime or shortly after certainly is, and has been for a long time, but it gets messier with works that weren't published until the 1960s or later:
http://www.robert-e-howard.org/AnotherThought4ws02.html

 

[slaughterj]

Interesting stuff, especially to me as I'm an intellectual property attorney. For more info, see www.copyright.gov and particularly http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ1.html#hlc

 

[BhilJhoanz]

so when can we get free web versions of the complete works like was done with Lovecraft?

 

[S'mon]

so when can we get free web versions of the complete works like was done with Lovecraft?

Well you'd need to be careful since apparently some pieces like "The Vale of Lost Women" might still be in copyright.

 

[Anonymous]

If you'll check out another of those Another Thought articles, you'll see a complete listing of all the REH works that are in the PD. I'm the IP lawyer that wrote that series of articles. For that matter, I'm currently publishing REH at a pretty quick pace, via Wildside Press, the fourth book in the set just came out a couple weeks back, the next one in a couple months. All the Weird REH stuff, including all the Weird Tales stuff, like Conan, that I can get at should be hitting the street before the end of the year, with any luck.
Paul Herman

 

[Anonymous]

Something else to keep in mind when considering whether or not Howard's work is public domain and all that . . .

True, a slew of his work is in the public domain, but some of the characters are trademarked, so you can run into other problems . . .

(I had to deal with a whole mess of copyright and public domain issues when I adapted Howard's 'Casonetto's Last Song' as a short movie to be shown in last year's Lovecraft Film Festival . . . I still haven't sorted that whole mess out yet . . . )