Tintin Forums

What I don't understand: That article in the Independent mentions that "The comic also first appeared in the U.S. in 1929."
I thought that the earliest release of Tintin in the U.S. were the Golden Press books from the late 1950s?
Were there earlier publications of Tintin in the U.S.?

No, definitely not. This is a case of a journalist getting things wrong and obviously not as careful as Tintin with his reporting (not that Tintin did much of this!) :-)

Happy New Year, fellow Tintinologists... and welcome to the public domain, Tintin!

There's been a few news stories over the past week about Tintin entering the public domain. As jock123 has mentioned above, the copyright law in the US, as it applies to characters, means that aspects of the character as it existed in 1929 have become copyright.

May I recommend reading this section from an article on the Duke Law Center webpage. The whole page is quite interesting, for anyone who wants to know more about the nuances of copyright :-)


Apologies for missing this, Richard!

As you say, we don't know the details of the arrangement between Methuen and Casterman, but Methuen definitely owned the copyrights to the English language text and not the translators themselves. I say owned because the rights have passed hands a few times and are now owned by HarperCollins. They currently hold the rights to the English translations until they expire, whenever that is.

I have seen an old contract from Casterman (for the Golden Press books) which was a provisional contract for a short term duration. I imagine it would have been renewed again after it had expired, had things had gone well. With Methuen they developed a good relationship after a few years and they trusted them, so the contract might have been different, but I think they would still have retained an option for them to expire if not renewed. Casterman most likely continue to issue fixed-term contracts and re-new them, for every translation, which would make sense so that they can keep control of the work.

The GP contract states that the text "as it has been translated by the publishers, will remain the exclusive property of them. However, this text cannot in no case be used outside the scope of this contract nor after it has been terminated." (google translation from French). So, if the contract expires so does the copyright to the translation. Not that it's likely that the rights to the English language text will be allowed to expire, the names Snowy, Calculus, Thompsons, etc, are so embedded in the characters now.

However, I still have no idea when the English text itself would enter public domain, there might be different laws or lengths of tenure for works that are translated or owned and licensed by publishers. But I'm certain that it wouldn't have anything to do with Lonsdale-Cooper and Turner themselves, or their lifespan.

I think that the copyright is the same as for anything else, 70-years-from-translator's-death, or 70-years-from-publication, say if the translator was working for the publisher on a work-for-hire basis.

The most significant (to me at least as a non-lawyer) thing is it doesn't grant the translator any rights in the underlying work, it only protects the content of their translation: so the principle is that if Bill in Britain translates Marie-Claude's latest French language block-buster into English for a British edition, Bill's copyright would protect against Marie-Claude arranging an Austrailian edition using that translation without his permission. Similarly, Bill couldn't simply publish his translation without the say-so of Marie-Claude, nor license it to anyone else.

Obviously this might be something that is worked out contractually before-hand, so that Bill knows his translation may be used by the publisher to produce multiple editions in different territories, or that on signing on to take the job, he's agreeing to assign all his rights to Marie-Claude.

Ah good, thanks. To correct my earlier assertions, I may be wrong that the English copyright has nothing to do with Turner and Lonsdale-Cooper. We don't know the terms of the arrangement they had.

But if it was 70 years from publication the copyright to the English language Crab and Ottokar books would expire in 2028, which is fairly soon!