The pending copyright extension should not affect most MT works very much.
Nothing MT published in his lifetime is still protected. The last year his
estate enjoyed copyright protection over works he published was 1958.
Nothing posthumously published before Jan. 1, 1978 should be affected by
the new bill either. Those were covered by a 1909 law, not the 1976
revisions under which we operate now.

However, this bill, as I understand it, will extend the protection only to
works published after 1978. The term of protection will go from 50 years
after the death of the author to 70 years past death. The bill would also
extend corporate copyright by 20 years, so the Mark Twain Project's
Notebooks and Letters collections published since 1978 (except for those
portions previously published by Paine, et al) will enjoy 20 more years of
protection and monopoly pricing.

When Congress passed the 1976 copyright act, it grandfathered out the
distinctions between "published" and "unpublished" works. So anything
"fixed in a tangible medium" (letters, memos, diaries, e-mail) since 1978
enjoys the same copyright protection as published books. However,
unpublished stuff older than 20 years still counts under the messy "common
law" copyright principles of old -- until that protection evaporates in
2002. All of the MT material that remains unpublished in 2002 will enter
the public domain that year. That means the Mark Twain Papers and the Trust
will no longer have control over the unpublished material or its royalties.
So scholarship on American authors who published before 1978 will become
much easier in 2002.

But this bill severely threatens scholarly research into works written
after 1978. And it's part of a larger global problem. The current culture
of international copyright discourages scholarship. criticism, parody and
commentary. We are entering a period of poverty in the public domain. As
members of the reading public, we should be very concerned. Copyright was
Constitutionally mandated "to promote the progress of science and useful
arts, by securing FOR LIMITED TIMES to authors and inventors the exclusive
right to their respective writings and discoveries" (Art. I, Sec. 8).
Congress and President Clinton need to read the Constitution once in a
while, before they go giving Disney everything it wants, at our expense.

Siva Vaidhyanathan
History Department
Wesleyan University
Middletown, CT 06459
(860) 685-2996