The excellent chart entitled "When Works Pass Into the Public Domain" by Laura Gasaway provides guidance on when copyright protections normally end. When copyright lapses for a work it falls into the public domain and the copyright can not be retrieved. Because of the extension of the copyright term in the Sonny Bono Act (cited below) this site is very useful to those researching copyright. In addition, the Copyright Office has an information line on which trained professionals provide copyright information and they can perform copyright registration searches to determine if a work is still copyrighted.
- - Copyright R. S. Talab 2000.