From <a href="http://eon.law.harvard.edu/openlaw/eldredvashcroft/supct/amici/ip-lawprofs.pdf">some c
May 24, 2002
In 1888, the British author Herbert G. Wells wrote and published “The Time Traveler,” a short story about a
time machine. In 1895, he published The Time Machine as his first novel. The Time Machine was a critical and popular
success, bringing Wells fame, and enough money to quit his job as a biology teacher and devote himself to writing full-time. Wells went on to write and publish thirteen further novels and numerous short stories. He died in 1946. The copyright in The Time Machine was registered in the United States in 1895, and renewed in 1923. The novel entered the public domain in 1951. Since that date, it has
been continuously in print. Later authors have adapted The Time Machine in a variety of formats, including sequels, films, comic books, musicals, a ballet, and a video game. Since 1992, the full text of The Time Machine has been available on the Internet via Project Gutenberg. In Europe, The Time Machine is still protected by copyright.
It will not enter the public domain until 2016 -- 70 years following Wells’s death. In Europe, these works could not have been created at all unless their authors had secured a
license from Wells’s estate.
Wells’s 1933 novel The Shape of Things to Come will also enter the public domain in Europe in 2016. In the United States, however, the copyright in The The Shape of Things to Come, originally scheduled to expire in 1989, was
extended for an additional nineteen years by the 1976 Copyright Act, and extended again for another 20 years by
the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. The copyright in The Shape of Things to Come will endure in the
United States until 2028 – twelve years after the novel enters the public domain in Europe. In the United States,
The Shape of Things to Come is out of print.