[Proposed production] Short Fiction by Daphne Du Maurier

[Lukas Bystricky]

I'd like to start a short story compilation of Du Maurier stories (see spreadsheet). I've found scans for most of her early stories and they're not too long so it shouldn't be too much trouble to transcribe.

Here's the GitHub repo.

I have a basic question about copyright. As I understand it, copyright expires 95 years after publication. I know for books we only consider the year the book was published, which makes sense because the copyright is usually only given as a year. So until January 1st we can only work on books published before 1930, regardless of when during the year 1930 they first came out. Does the same rule apply to magazines, where we have a more exact publication date? For example Du Maurier has a few stories published in early 1930–more than 95 years ago. Could I include those already? I'm guessing the answer is no, but just thought I'd check. 

[Alex Cabal]

OK, Weijia will manage this with Robin reviewing.

I think technically it's OK to include work based on month, but for
consistency we should just stick with year calculations.

On 9/30/25 11:53 AM, Lukas Bystricky wrote:
> I'd like to start a short story compilation of Du Maurier stories (see

> spreadsheet <https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/
> d/1fjsN_XWap97TwESdl20QtEusFZprhPqOGA9WEot2a8o/edit?gid=0#gid=0>). I've

> found scans for most of her early stories and they're not too long so it
> shouldn't be too much trouble to transcribe.
>

> Here's the GitHub repo <https://github.com/lukasbystricky/daphne-du-
> maurier_short-fiction>.

>
> I have a basic question about copyright. As I understand it, copyright
> expires 95 years after publication. I know for books we only consider
> the year the book was published, which makes sense because the copyright
> is usually only given as a year. So until January 1st we can only work
> on books published before 1930, regardless of when during the year 1930
> they first came out. Does the same rule apply to magazines, where we
> have a more exact publication date? For example Du Maurier has a few
> stories published in early 1930–more than 95 years ago. Could I include
> those already? I'm guessing the answer is no, but just thought I'd check.
>

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[Weijia Cheng]

Ok, noted.

[Anthony J. Bentley]

The month of publication doesn’t matter. These works receive their copyright from 17 U.S.C. section 304, and section 305 states:

“All terms of copyright provided by sections 302 through 304 run to the end of the calendar year in which they would otherwise expire.”