is this in public domain?

[david wales]

Hi o great masters of librivox

Gutenberg has just added a book that I would be quite interested in recording for librivox. It is

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/54150

The Medieval Latin Hymn by Ruth Ellis Messenger.

The book has a copyright date of 1953. Is it in the public domain. If not, why is it on gutenberg's site?

All by way of saying I hope I can record it for us.

[Availle]

If it is on gutenberg.org with a "public domain" entry in the Bibrec tab, it is fine for us to record. Gutenberg.org are very diligent when checking copyright.

Post-1922 texts can be out of copyright in the US for various reasons. One of them is that texts needed a renewal of copyright after 28 years (or so) to remain copyrighted. If this renewal didn't happen in the correct time slot, the text became public domain.

It is not always easy to check whether a book fell out of copyright because of this, so we don't do it but usually refer people to gutenberg.org (who does checking for other people as well). In this case, since your text is already offered there, it is fine for us to record.

[david wales]

oooooh, thank you so much for the help and clarification. Now I have to brush up on my high school Latin pronunciation!