Hello!

My name is Chad, and I am the legal intern here. As I am a full time law student, I haven't gotten much of a chance to introduce myself. Finals started right around the time Singularity started its website. For the sake of transparency and with Ash's permission of course, I thought it would be fun to open things up for some questions. Please do not ask me for legal advice as I cannot give it. I can tell you about what I do and facts about the law in general, but I cannot give you legal advice. Also please do not rely on any facts which I state here as a substitute for consultation with an actual attorney.

So now that I am done giving all of my warnings, please feel free to ask about what I do, who I am, or about intellectual property. If I cannot answer something for some reason, I will simply say I cannot say. To give you an idea about what I do, I tend to do research into whether books are copyrighted, who might own them, international copyright (very little as we are not doing anything with foreign authors), etc. I one time had to go to the church of latter day saints to try to hunt down information on who might inherit the rights to a book in England, but we came up short (Pro-tip: The mormons own ancestry.com and they let you use it for free if you go to the physical location).

So let the games begin.

Chad, in the UK there is a publicly recorded court process to determine who has the rights to administer the estate of a desceased person. See www.justice.gov.uk/courts/probate/copies-of-grants-wills for details of how to get a copy of the documentation and the will (if any). Records only go back to 1858, but since copyright only lasts 70 years after death that shouldn't be a problem. Apologies if you already know this and were trying to track down later decendants.

Hey Tim,

Thank you for your response. Yes, I came across that I believe, but the problem is that we'd end up running at least 2 searches which would take several weeks to finally get to the end. I've bookmarked it now though so it will definitely come in handy in the future so thank you for resupplying it to me. -Chad

It seems that the case mentioned in this article:
has a strong impact on the SavetheScifi mission. Do you know if this case has been resolved? Will the STSF organization be saving any post 1923 books prior to the decision?