[SirSavary]

Crazy huh? If an author wrote something as a child and lived over a hundred, you could hit even two hundred :)

F. Scott Fitzgerald, the author, died in December 1940. Given the rules around copyright I would have expected things to expire in 2010 (death of author, roll to next calendar year, +70 years) so I'm unsure what happened here.

[duskwuff]

The rules were different at the time Gatsby was published. Its copyright expired 95 years after it was published - 1930 + 95 = 2025.

[cyphar]

I was under the impression that the Mickey Mouse Protection Act 1998[1] extended the copyright protection for works retroactively (though already public domain works were excluded).

That being said, I guess the act had precautions to stop it from reducing the copyright protection for edge cases like these?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act

[kazinator]

But Nick is not a derivative work; it's something original which references the characters and ideas in The Great Gatsby.

It's pretty crazy that you have to wait until 95 years until the publication of the referenced work to publish something like this.

Is it even about copyright or more about the abstract threat of litigation using copyright as a (baseless) pretext.

[SirSavary]

Whack, I always naively assumed copyright periods have only ever gotten longer. Good to know The Mouse [1] has precedent behind their legal theory :)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act#S...

[incompatible]

It was published in 1925 and expired in 2021.

[incompatible]

The US only switched to the life + 70 system in recent decades, and it doesn't retroactively apply.

I think if you add a child as a coauthor, the copyright will last longer. Nobody seems to do that, probably because it now lasts long enough for just about anybody.