music was out of copyright, but that the libretto was protected because one of its three joint authors was still living.
Termination
by forfeiture
or lachesA copyright is terminated ipse facto by forfeiture as provided in the act, either because of failure to deposit copies after notice from the Copyright Office (sec. 13), or because of false affidavit of American manufacture (sec. 17). It may also be terminated by laches, that is, carelessness in protecting one's rights, as by omission of the notice, unless by accident or mistake, from particular copies (sec. 20).
Abandon-
mentA copyright may be terminated by voluntaryabandonment or purposed dedication as well as by expiration, forfeiture or laches. Thus in 1854 Congress purchased for $10,000 the copyright of Sumner's new method of ascertaining a ship's position, dedicated the method to general public use, and extinguished the copyright. The Copyright Office has no authority to recognize annulments, but it has noted request for annulment when received on the registry. In 1910 the Oxford University Press, American Branch, formally notified the Treasury Department that they abandoned the copyright on Oxford Cyclopaedic Concordance copyrighted by them in 1903, and collectors of customs were accordingly authorized by circular letter of January 25, 1910, to permit importation "of any copies of the said work with the notice of the copyright obliterated, or a notice of the abandonment of the copyright plainly printed upon the same page with the notice of copyright and adjacent thereto." This last was a curious "boomerang" effect of the manufacturing clause as extended to binding in the act of 1909.
In EnglandIn England the term of book copyright has been thelife of the author and seven years after his death, or forty-two years from first publication, whichever
