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Medhurst papers wsa Re: Seibt Photo

Original poster: Jim Lux <jimlux@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>

At 04:06 PM 6/14/2005, you wrote: 
Original poster: Terry Fritz <teslalist@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

Hi,

Bob Jones sent in the Medhurst notes and they are at:

http://www.hot-streamer.com/temp/medhurst.zip

"Hi Ed,

I believe I do have it.
Yes I found it. Four of his papers  zipped in to one file. The last one is
the one you want I believe.
I assume there are no copyright issues as its about  fifty years old.

In the past, copyright extended 50 years past the author's death. These days, it's much longer due to the "Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act" of 1998 (allegedly so that Mickey Mouse, ca 1920s, remains in copyright).


If you wanted to be strictly legal you'd ask:
1) Did Medhurst do this as a "work for hire" for GE (in England), and so, did GE own the copyright?
2) It might have been publicly funded, which often (but not always) puts the resulting work in the public domain.
3) Did whoever did hold copyright assign it to the publisher of Wireless Engineer?
4) is the publisher (Iliffe and sons) still in business, and if not, have the rights reverted.
5) It's even more complex, because it was published in England, and the rules are different.

The summary is that just because it's old doesn't mean it's out of copyright.

Medhurst was publishing papers in IEEE journals as recently as the late 60's, and there's some really intriguing hits on Google where it appears he was involved in the Society for Psychical Research. He also wrote some papers (in the 1950s) on integrating functions like sinc(x), and some papers on rain attenuation of microwave signals. So, even on the old copyright standard, I wouldn't count on those papers being older than 50 years past the death of the author.

One could also buy the relevant issues of Wireless Engineer for less than $10. You can get the entire year's WE bound in red cloth boards with gilt lettering for GBP25 from KellyBooks. (the latter is almost certainly from some institutional library throwing away "all that useless junk") It would be a fine addition to any TCphile's library.

Fascinating stuff. By the way, the same publisher also published "Wireless World" which published the famous paper in 1945 by Clarke on the use of satellites in a geostationary orbit.
(Wireless world became Electronics World in the 90s)