As of last week, both the House and the Senate passed legislation to
extend copyrights by another 20 years.  John Mark Ockerbloom, who
runs the Online Books page <http://www.cs.cmu.edu/books.html>, has
posted information about this and its ramifications for online
archives and libraries.

Copyrights on _Europe and Elsewhere_ (including "The War Prayer,"
"The United States of Lyncherdom," etc., which were first published
there) and the 1923 edition of _Mark Twain's Speeches_, which were
due to expire at the end of this year, will be the first to be
effected by this, and Paine's 2-volume edition of the Autobiography
will be the next.  I don't know how many times I've been asked why I
don't list "The War Prayer" at my Twain site and was really looking
forward to that copyright expiring.

Does anyone know what other impacts this will have on Twain
publishing?  Does it have any impact on the lack of coverage of
Twain's writings published after 1976?  According to Ockerbloom, the
2002 date for expiration of copyrights on unpublished writings by
long-dead writers is maintained in the new law.  The copyright law
seems to be getting more and more inconsistent with each revision.

Jim Zwick
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http://home.ican.net/~fjzwick/
http://marktwain.miningco.com/