A library record says "No known copyright restrictions." The back of the card says "COPYRIGHTED" and names the man who claimed it. Dating the card, the 1909 Act's renewal rule and the Copyright Office's own records, searched in order, with each query shown.
I was choosing pictures for a local-history project when I turned down a postcard of the Motel Wigwam Village in Orlando, Florida. The Boston Public Library holds it in its Tichnor Brothers collection, and the library's record on Digital Commonwealth gives it the title "U.S. Highways 441-92 & 17, 700 South Orange Blossom Trail, Orlando, Florida", the date "[ca. 1930–1945]" and the rights statement "No known copyright restrictions." The licence field adds "No known restrictions on use."
The back of the card says something the record doesn't. Along the divider between the message and the address, in small type, it reads: "PHOTO, ART WORK, COPYRIGHTED AND PRODUCED BY DOUGLAS R. SMITH, 422 WASHINGTON BUILDING 5, D. C."
That notice is why I put the card aside. Afterwards I went back to find out whether I had been right to, using only records anyone can query. What follows is that walk, with each query shown, so it can be run again on another card.
"No known copyright restrictions" belongs to a family of standard statements published by RightsStatements.org. Its definition is careful. The organization offering the item "reasonably believes that the Item is not restricted by copyright or related rights, but a conclusive determination could not be made." It also says: "You are responsible for your own use." The label is a belief, and it says so.
A second library labels the same motel differently. The University of South Florida's Hampton Dunn postcard collection holds a Curt Teich card of Wigwam Village No. 4 in Orlando. Its record gives the creation date as "1900", the period as "circa 1900s", and the rights statement as "No Copyright - United States", which means the library "believes that the Item is in the Public Domain under the laws of the United States."
The motel opened in 1948. That date comes from a National Register of Historic Places nomination for a later motel in the same chain, Wigwam Village No. 7, which records that No. 4 "opened in 1948 in Orlando, Florida." So both libraries' dates fall before the motel existed: the Boston range ends in 1945, three years before it opened, and the USF date is 48 years early. Both miss toward the past, where a public-domain belief is easier to hold. Neither label is the record of a search.
The library's "ca. 1930–1945" is not this card's date. The same range sits on a second card from the collection, filed two accession numbers away, and that card's own back rules the range out.
The second card advertises the Arrowhead Restaurant at 23 North Orange Blossom Trail, on the same road. It carries the same notice, word for word but for an ampersand. Its back calls the place the "World's Finest Drive-In Restaurant" and says "Built in 1954." Both cards have a five-digit number in the stamp box: 87888 on the restaurant card, 88915 on the motel card. If those numbers ran in the order the cards were made, the motel card is no older than 1954. If they didn't, the floor is the motel's own opening in 1948.
The top end is softer. Smith's address carries a postal zone, the 5 in "WASHINGTON BUILDING 5, D. C.", and no ZIP Code. The Post Office had used zones in 124 urban areas since 1943, and ZIP Codes were introduced on July 1, 1963, according to the Library of Congress. A printed address can outlast a change like that, so the zone suggests a card from before mid-1963 without proving it.
Put together: the evidence points to the mid-1950s, the earliest likely year is 1954, and nothing on the card points past 1963. No line on it proves the year. As the next step shows, the year is the whole question.
Before 1978, American copyright ran under the Copyright Act of 1909, and that act decides this card.
Start with the notice. Section 18 says a notice "shall consist either of the word 'Copyright' or the abbreviation 'Copr.', accompanied by the name of the copyright proprietor," and it requires the year only "if the work be a printed literary, musical, or dramatic work." For prints and pictorial illustrations, the © symbol with initials could serve instead. So a postcard's notice needed no year, and this one prints none. The fact that sets the clock running is missing from the card by design.
The card's own word, "COPYRIGHTED," is not one of the forms Section 18 names. I haven't researched how the courts or the Copyright Office treated that word. For a card published from 1954 to 1963 it doesn't change the answer, because there the renewal decides. For a card from 1964 or later it might matter, and that question belongs to someone who has studied it.
Then the term. Copyright under the 1909 Act ran 28 years from first publication, with a second term only if a renewal application was "duly registered ... within one year prior to the expiration of the original term." Later laws lengthened that second term until the whole ran 95 years.
The Copyright Office's Circular 15A states what happened to works from the 1950s that missed the renewal: "if renewal registration for these works was not made within the statutory time limits, a copyright originally secured between 1950 and 1963 expired on December 31 of its 28th year, and protection was lost permanently." For works first published from 1964 to 1977 the rule is different: "Congress amended the copyright law on June 26, 1992, to automatically renew the copyright in these works and to make renewal registration for them optional."
One more rule closes a tempting shortcut. A work that was never registered in its first term could still be renewed. Circular 6A tells applicants that "If a work was not registered for the original term," they should "complete and submit Form RE and Form RE/Addendum." So finding no original registration settles nothing. Only the absence of a renewal does.
The arithmetic follows from the rules. A card first published in 1954 needed its renewal registered during 1982, the 28th year of its term. Without one it expired on December 31, 1982; with one it would run to the end of 2049. A card from 1963 had until the end of 1991. A card from 1964 was renewed automatically and stays protected to the end of 2059, whatever anyone filed. The Catcher in the Rye shows the clock on a real record: registered in 1951 as A56070, it was renewed on January 22, 1979, as RE0000018341.
If the card was renewed, the renewal is a public record. The Copyright Office's Public Records System, at publicrecords.copyright.gov, holds registrations and renewals from 1978 on, plus an indexed part of the office's older card catalog. It can be searched by name, title and keyword. These searches were run on October 28, 2026, and every page of results was read.
The name to search is the one in the notice. The card sits in the library's Tichnor Brothers collection, and its back carries a red "OFFICE FILE" stamp, but the notice claims the copyright for Douglas R. Smith. A search under the collection's name looks in the wrong place.
Douglas R. Smith. A name search returns 126 records and a keyword search 198, and between them only ten records name him at all: songs from 1979 to 2004, a 1986 jigsaw puzzle and the like. None is a renewal, and none is a print.
Tichnor. "Tichnor Brothers" returns 144 records and "Tichnor Bros." 48, all from the old card catalog's drawers for 1898 to 1945. None is a renewal.
The titles. "Motel Wigwam Village" returns nothing, and "Wigwam Village" returns three records, from 1998, 1999 and 2011. A keyword search for "Wigwam" returns 422 records. Seven are renewals, all of songs and books with the word in their titles, such as "Wigwam Kate", "Wigwam lullaby" and "Wigwam stories". None is a print, and none is the motel.
An empty result means something only if the search could have found a hit, so it needs a control. Searching Salinger's name returns the Catcher renewal among ten renewal records. Searching Brown & Bigelow, whose records here are mostly calendars and prints, returns 14,213 records. Of the first 2,000, 1,954 are renewals, and 510 of those renew prints: 156 were registered in 1978 and 195 in 1980. One is RE0000714189, "Seaworthy." Print renewals from the years when renewals of 1950s works fell due are in the index, and a claimant's name finds them.
The Copyright Office's Virtual Card Catalog, at vcc.copyright.gov, shows images of the old index cards from 1870 to 1977. Its text search covers only the 1955–1970 and 1971–1977 indexes.
The catalog warns that "Any results obtained during the course of your enhanced browse are not reliable for legal matters," and its 1946–1954 index can't be searched as text at all. A 1954 registration by Smith could sit there unseen. By Circular 6A that wouldn't change the answer, because the renewal is what counts.
So the answer depends on the year:
Letting a copyright lapse was the norm. Barbara A. Ringer's 1960 study "Renewal of Copyright" (Copyright Law Revision Study No. 31) counted renewals for works registered in 1931 and 1932.
Roughly 19 registered prints in 20 were let go at the end of their first term. One photo postcard in the card catalog was filed as a print: a 1965 Tichnor post card of the Bedford flag, from an "Original color photo", registered as K73914, in the prints class. If this card's "PHOTO" put it with the photographs instead, the base rate is lower still. Those rates are for works that had been registered. Whether this card ever was, the searchable records don't say.
On the evidence, this is a mid-1950s card whose copyright, if the notice ever secured one, lapsed at the end of its 28th year with no renewal in any record I could search. "On the evidence" is doing work in that sentence. The card never prints its year, and the year decides between public domain since the early 1980s and copyright until about 2060. None of this is legal advice; it is the public record, read in order.
For the project I was choosing for, "most likely" wasn't enough, and the card stayed in the pile I didn't use.
Chain of Consciousness keeps a tamper-evident, dated record in hash-linked entries, so a search you ran on one day, and what it found or failed to find, can be shown later in the order it happened.
pip install chain-of-consciousness npm install chain-of-consciousness
Or start without installing anything: Hosted Chain of Consciousness.