Author talk:Robert William Service

Moved from Scriptorium archives edit

I am certainly no expert, I am willing to be corrected, but Robert Service is a fairly modern poet. He lived (January 16, 1874 - September 11, 1958) fairly recently. Does this not mean his stuff is still copyright? Wikilink here On the other hand, we really need to include Bill the Bomber in his list of works. I like that one.

[[PaulinSaudi 21:24, 12 Aug 2004 (UTC)]]

This is really a question of which law applies, and whether there were U. S. editions of the works. Most of the poetry for which he is famous was published before 1923. If there was a U. S. edition before that date it should be fine to include it. Project Gutenberg already has some. If Canadian law applies everything would still be copyright until the end of 2008. If French law applies (notably for the later works) the copyright continues until 2028. Eclecticology 02:21, 13 Aug 2004 (UTC)
RobertWService.com has a letter from the lawyer of Robert Service's estate stating that all of his poems published before 1922 are in the public domain in the U.S. but are still copyrighted throughout the British Commonwealth. So they should be fine to publish on Wikisource (as long as they were published before 1922). Biggins 04:14, 13 Aug 2004 (UTC)
before 1923 rather than 1922. Eclecticology 06:28, 13 Aug 2004 (UTC)
A super answer 'Biggins. Thank you very much. (Now any chance of getting Bil the Bomber? [[PaulinSaudi 04:18, 13 Aug 2004 (UTC)]]
Done and done Biggins 05:25, 13 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Eek! That's the most disturbing poem with regular meter that I have ever read. --[[User:Ardonik|User:Ardonik(talk)]] 15:56, 3 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Hi. I put those Project Gutenberg editions online a long time ago - and to my knowledge, only made one little mistake. (Not being a drunk, I didn't know that "jag" was a synonym (or something similar) of "drunken". So in "The Shooting of Dan McGrew" that should be "jagtime tune", not "ragtime tune". (In my defense, I corrected a LOT of errors in the books I put online, and introduced very few.)

In any case, I'm glad this is here, but wouldn't it make sense to point to the Gutenberg editions? This is one area where I think the closed model would be better than the Wiki model, generally speaking.