Google Offers Copyright Status Tool

Google's Book Search program is now offering a very handy free database for publishers - one which lists books for which the copyright was not renewed between 1923 and 1963 (thus putting them in the public domain):

For U.S. books published between 1923 and 1963, the rights holder needed to submit a form to the U.S. Copyright Office renewing the copyright 28 years after publication. In most cases, books that were never renewed are now in the public domain...The Copyright Office hasn't digitized their earlier records, but Carnegie Mellon scanned them as part of their Universal Library Project, and the tireless folks at Project Gutenberg and the Distributed Proofreaders painstakingly typed in every word.

Thanks to the efforts of Google software engineer Jarkko Hietaniemi, we've gathered the records from both sources, massaged them a bit for easier parsing, and combined them into a single XML file available for download here.

There are undoubtedly errors in these records, but we believe this is the best and most comprehensive set of renewal records available today. These records are free and in the public domain, and we hope you're able to use them to determine the copyright status of books that interest you.

With the rise of Print on Demand, reprinting of public domain titles has become a worthwhile project for many publishers (see my article here). This handy database from Google is definitely a great tool for anyone interested in publishing such books.