While Project Gutenberg has mostly avoided Lovecraft, Wikisource has embraced him and now contains his complete works. Is inclusion in this high-profile archive justification enough to read his works on Librivox?
The talk page for that entry contains this question and answer:
So, what's the deal here? Lovecraft's complete works are available online at a high-profile archive. This does not seem to have been challenged by Arkham house. Snip! (incorrect information)I'm quite interested to know how the works of H.P. Lovecraft came to be in Wikibooks: can I now assume some of his works, including The Call of Cthulhu are now in the public domain? If so, I'd be interested to know why they are now in the public domain and what were the original sources for the works included here? --Axon 14:24, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)
A source for publication information for Lovecraft's stories is http://www.dagonbytes.com/thelibrary/lovecraft/. I would also recommend examining the links listed on the article page concerning S. T. Joshi's research. I examined the project Gutenberg compilations of copyright renewal information and could find no references to Lovecraft at all in the records from 1953 to 1967. Although there were a number of renewals by August Derleth, all were for Mr. Derleth's own work. There were no renewal notices whatsoever for Donald Wandrei. If any other supposed copyright holders make themselves known their claims could be examined but until then I think it is reasonable to assume that the copyrights on Mr. Lovecraft's works have expired. -- CSN 02:23, 30 Mar 2005 (UTC)
More explication is available on the author page:
Bear with me here. Can we just call this case closed and start submitting Lovecraft if we can cite evidence that the work is public domain? This would include the majority of his short stories. I'm sure there are a LARGE number of listeners/readers who would love to. The worst case scenario is that Arkham House asks us to take it down, but we'd be in good faith, considering that the general consensus of the Wikimedia project as a whole is for public domain Lovecraft.* According to S.T. Joshi's "H.P. Lovecraft: A Life" (pp. 640-641): Much of Lovecraft's work is in the public domain. This is unquestionably so in terms of the tales, essays, and poems published in the amateur press. As for stories published in "Weird Tales", the six that the magazine owned outright should have had their copyrights renewed after twenty-eight years, but repeated searches in the Library of Congress have turned up no renewals of any kind. Of the stories Lovecraft himself controlled, by law only he, his heirs, or his executor could have renewed the rights, but this was never done.
* The University of Pennsylvania has posted a page with scans of copyright records at http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/cce/. These may be reviewed from the convenience of your home, when looking for renewals. Chris Karr has reviewed these documents and has published a report of his findings at http://www.aetherial.net/personal/files/lovecraft_renewals.pdf . In short, there are no copyright records that reference any of Lovecraft's original stories (only the Arkham House compilations), but the copyrights to "Weird Tales" were renewed properly, and works published prior to 1926 (when Lovecraft is thought to have sold full rights to "Weird Tales") in that magazine may be subject to protection IF they were published in "Weird Tales" for the first time. Joshi identifies thirteen works and believes that seven of those thirteen had been published elsewhere previously.
