Mash Ups

When is a Public Domain Book not a Public Domain Book?

There is a book called The Adventure by Miss Moberly which details a timeslip at Versailles at the beginning of the 20th Century. I became aware of this book years ago when I was teaching nightclasses on ghosts and the paranormal. It is a classic and available at Archive.org.

There are also a couple of version on Kindle. One at least has a decent cover. The problem with The Adventure is that Moberly uses footnotes extensively and also uses a lot of French in sometimes long passages which she doesn't bother translate. The OCR has totally butchered the text with the footnotes being incorporated into the main text rendering it nearly unreadable. Also the French, though it has copied pretty well has been stripped of its accents and diacritic marks, so that it really isn't French at all.

I had thought I would clean up the text, restore the footnotes and re-do the French. I thought I'd also translate the French for the benefit of those who don't speak it.

The footnotes are of two types - extra commentaries and references to other books. I thought I would remove them altogether by using modern Harvard style referencing rather than footnotes and just incorporating the extra commentary in-text.

Further than that I wanted to add an introduction and link it to subsequent reports of timeslips such as Dunnichen Hill and Broad Street, Liverpool as well as some told to me directly by my students over the years. I have a nice one from Pembroke Castle for example.

When I've done all this - is this still public domain, or is the work my copyright?

Here's a link to US copyright law summarised by Project Gutenburg.

And there's a nice summary of the UK position by Tony Laidig (no relation) here, which is more complex than the US position.

Given that roughly the law is that 70 years after an author's death the works pass to the public domain, here's a list of the date of death of authors...

List of Authors by Year of Death at KingKong.

Like who would? But I'm glad they did.