The Waste Land is copyrighted but not in the U.S.

The Waste Land is still under copyright restrictions in the United Kingdom and most likely in the countries of the European Union, the Commonwealth of Nations and other countries. Copies of T.S. Eliot's poems, plays, essays and other of his works that are placed on computers for public access through the internet may be infringing on copyrights held by Faber and Faber, Mrs. T.S. Eliot and others.

However, as far as I can tell, The Waste Land has been in the public domain in the United States since January 1, 1998. The laws in the United States have periodically been changed to lengthen copyright. However, works that were registered with the copyright office prior to 1923 had, at most, 75 years of protection plus the remainder of the calendar year in which the protection lapsed. Since The Waste Land has been posted at many web and ftp sites and it is freely available I offer my own HTML formatted version annotated with hypertext.

Currently, most countries, including the United States, have copyright laws that automatically cover an author's work even when the copyright is not officially registered or even if a copyright notice is not printed on the work. The copyright extends for the life of the author (or longest lived author in the case of multiple authorship) plus a period of time after death (50 or 70 years).

To anyone would you want to limit people's access to works of art, which you yourself did not create...I take issue.

---

• Play Damage
• Don't Make Me Come Over There

Poetry      Home