Medieval Bestiary : Copyright

Note: I am not a lawyer and the following is only my understanding of applicable copyright law. Copyright law is extremely complex and varies from country to country. None of what follows should be construed as legal advice.

For the purposes of copyright, this Web site and all of its content is published in Canada.

Other copyrighted materials are used by permission of the copyright holder, or are used under the "fair dealing/fair use" clause of most copyright law, or are believed to be in the public domain. If you are the copyright owner of any material on this site and do not agree that its use here is valid, please contact the Webmaster with details of the item in question and the page it is on.

Some links on this site will take you to another site, usually in a new browser window. Such sites may be protected by copyright, but are not under my control, and I cannot take any responsibility for their content.

Permission to copy and/or republish

This work is made available under a
Creative Commons Licence

Under the Creative Commons licence (click the link above to see the full license terms), any materials on this site may be copied and used for any non-commercial purpose, unless a specific external copyright is stated. All items having a copyright notice may require the permission of the stated copyright holder for any use, and I cannot give such permission; contact the copyright holder or more information. Republishing of this entire website or any substantial portion of it in any form is strongly discouraged; if you want to use a large portion of the site, please ask first!

Some images used on this site may be protected by copyright. Most of these are copyright by external organizations, which must be contacted for permission to republish; the owner of this web site (David Badke) cannot give this permission. To enable you to find the original source of the image and its (possible) copyright holder, all images used here are accompanied by a clickable symbol (icon):

This symbol indicates that additional information about the source of an image is available. Click the symbol to show the image information page (in a popup window) for the item, which provides full source details.

There may be items published on this site which I believe to be in the public domain: no longer protected by copyright laws and freely usable by anyone without permission. These items will be marked as such. To determine if an item is in the public domain, I am using the rather fuzzy copyright terms described below. Although this site is published in Canada, there is some question of which country's copyright law is in effect, since Web publishing is essentially global. In the absence of any overriding constraints, copyright will be assumed to have expired 50 years after the death of the author.

Canada: The term of copyright is for the life of the author and for an additional 50 years from the end of the year in which he/she died. Therefore, as of 2021, any work by an author who died in 1971 or earlier is in the public domain. Since it is the year of the author's death that determines copyright expiration, this information will be provided if possible. Canadian copyright law is used as the basis for this site.

United Kingdom: The term of copyright is for the life of the author and for an additional 70 years from the end of the year in which he/she died. Therefore, as of 2021, any work by an author who died in 1951 or earlier is in the public domain. However, it is possible that works produced before the 1988 copyright act took effect are governed by the 1911 or 1956 copyright act, which provide a protection period of 50 years after the death of the author; if so (and this is not at all clear!), any work by an author who died in 1971 or earlier is in the public domain.

United States of America: Because of numerous changes to US copyright law, there are several (confusing) terms of copyright. If a work was published before 1923, it is now in the public domain. If a work was published from 1923 to 1963 and it included an explicit copyright notice, it was protected for 28 years and could have been renewed for an additional 67 years. If not so renewed, or if it originally had no copyright notice, it is now in public domain. If published from 1964 to 1977 with a copyright notice, it is protected for 28 years for first term, with an automatic extension of 67 years for second term; if it had no copyright notice, it is in the public domain. Anything published from 1978 on is protected for the life of the author plus at least 70 years, and possibly up to 95 years.

Berne Convention/Universal Copyright Convention: Authors who live or publish in countries that are signatories of the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, or to the Universal Copyright Convention (UCC), automatically receive copyright protection in all other countries that are also signitories. Most countries belong to at least one of these conventions. The international copyright conventions generally give authors of member countries the same level of copyright protection they give their own nationals. The Berne treaty establishes that copyright extends to 50 years after the author's death, and such copyrights are to be acknowledged by all countries that are signatories of the treaty.

Other Resources

An excellent article on copyright and the public domain can be found on the University of Pennsylvania Online Books site.