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 According to Ockerbloom, the 2002 date for expiration of copyrights on unpublished writings by long-dead writers is maintained in the new law.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 [log in to unmask] http://home.ican.net/~fjzwick/ http://marktwain.miningco.com/