One bit of paranoia concerned the Syriac fragments of Eusebius, printed by Gerhard Beyer in 1926 in the German journal Oriens Christianus. I couldn’t find any information on when he died. In Europe, copyright extends until 70 years after the death of the author, you see. So I wrote to Hubert Kaufhold and Manfred Kropp, the current editors of Oriens Christianus, asking whether they knew when he died and if they claimed a copyright.
I had a very friendly email back from Dr Kropp yesterday, promising to look; and tonight Dr Kaufhold wrote as follows:
… Bei dem Autor des Oriens Christianus Dr. Gerhard Beyer handelte es sich um einen katholischen Priester, der 1931 gestorben ist (vgl. H. Kaufhold, Oriens Christianus. Gesamtregister für die Bände 1 (1901) bis 70 (1986), Wiesbaden 1989, S. 39, 146. Ein Urheberrecht besteht deshalb nicht mehr, so daß Sie seine Edition ohne weiteres verwenden können.
…Dr Gerhard Beyer was a Catholic priest, who died in 1931 (see H. Kaufhold, Oriens Christianus. Collected indexes for vols 1 (1901) to 70 (1986), Wiesbaden 1989, pp. 39, 146. No copyright exists any longer, so you can use his edition freely.
Full marks to the OC team to keep track of such things! Who would have guessed that an index with that sort of information in it existed?
I must remember to thank them in the book, and send them a copy of the electronic text when I have it.
You know I was thinking… I do not think I know, and I do not think most readers know how much all this costing you, besides hours of labor. When you post things like you did this copies, or that search, or hired translating, requests and such, would you please put your costs, at least hard costs next to them?
I will certainly bear it in mind.
On death dates (on which so much copyright depends): these can be very difficult to come by. Like OC, I too have an occasional “secret” resource of this kind, which may save you — and anyone else reading this comment, of course — a bit of time. The index page to my “Antiquary’s Shoebox” doesn’t look like it has death dates, but it does: in the sourcecode. A table of scholars and death dates is in there, under “MARK3”; and some few others can be found by searching the sourcecode for “died”. I may eventually get around to making a visible page with the information, but for now, it’s usable to them that know how to look. The scholars are mostly people who wrote on Roman stuff.
Thanks for the tip!
I tend to use the http://www.copac.ac.uk. Often the death date of the author is indicated.
Have you found them to be any better for this than the other library catalogs, or different from them? I use my local library (University of Chicago), Harvard, and the Library of Congress; and about 80%, for the authors I’m interested in, there’s no death date. I also strongly suspect that all three in fact share one common database, since I’ve never found any difference.
I’ve never really used any other catalogue. But I find rather better than 20% of authors in it, so worth a go. I always wondered where the data came from.