A good book on the whole, which I enjoyed reading.
His index is not very useful in that it misses areas that are discussed in the body of the book (no entries for films with unusual copyright status such as "His Girl Friday" or "It's a Wonderful life", and no entry for important issues like "Rule of the Shorter Term"). There is no discussion of the US DMCA rules or the WIPO treaty.
Also, I'm not sure I agree with all of his assertions. For example, his definition of "publication" is not correct for film in Chapter 7 (page 172) - he states that publication only occurs when copies of a film are made available to the public for purchase, rental, or loan". He then discusses a "consensus" that film distribution methods may constitute publication. However, from copyright.gov/circs/circ01.pdf : "The offering to distribute copies of phonorecords to a group of persons for purposes of further distribution, public performance, or, public display constitutes publication".
In the section on "Rule of the shorter term", he lists countries that do not follow the rule on page 308, but then later lists countries where application of that rule is unclear on page 310. This type of information unfortunately is constantly changing - I think the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_the_shorter_term link gives a more definitive answer (YES they apply the rule for the EU - at least the "European Economic Area" members - as defined in directive 2006/116/EC).
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I was hoping this book would help us find artwork and photographs for my daughter to create book covers for author stories and novels. In the end, it does do that, but it's not 100% feeding a person the answer and it cannot, since copyright vs. public domain is a very, very complex process.+ The first half of the book has sections on:WritingMusicArtPhotography (small: about 10 pages)Movies & TelevisionComputer SoftwareArchitecture (about 7 pages)Choreography (less than 5 pages)+ Typical section will cover:* What is public domain for that property* How do you determine copyright for that property* Where to find public domain for that property-- Not consistent in each section to cover the same level of public domain concerns and/or resources.+ The second half of the book teaches a ton of info about databases, the Internet, copyright laws, etc.> I tried jumping directly to Photographs and the section would say something like, "To determine if a photograph is public domain you must first determine the date/year it was published."Okay. How? What if the online photo doesn't say?We are further given directions, such as to research a database or two to determine if the photo you are interested in is in that database, which will tell you if it is copyright or public domain. Goshdarn! So I need to become a research expert (or so it feels) in order to get my real answer.Not the fault of the author or book, but simply the laws of copyright are at fault in that the processes are not easy. But, I would have appreciated more details from the book on what to expect or what critical information I need in order to use said database or archive.-- I'm a person who learns by example, so more actual examples of how a photo or art was truly determined public domain or not (even if it is only one possible facet in a complex system) would have helped a new person like myself grasp the copyright domain better. At least in the photograph section, this was lacking.OVERALL: There is a lot of good information in here to help protect a person from getting sued for violating copyright. I had book covers made by someone on Fiver dot com who simply stole copyright art from the Internet and slapped together a copy. Once I realized this a year or so later, I changed it out fast, but it could have cost me more than $5 if the right/wrong people had found out. I feel more forewarned and there are several public domain sites and locations provided in this book, that I feel makes the cost of the book more than worth it...especially since I'll now be using public domain property instead of making ignorant mistakes.
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