There are several ways you can check copyright renewal for yourself. These links are included below, and of course, the easiest one is to do this online. If you happen to live in Washington D.C. (home of the Copyright Office) or near a large library like the San Francisco Library, you might save on some money by heading down to the location and looking through the copyright records yourself.

Alternatively, partial copyright renewal records are also placed online. These aren’t search-friendly (just direct scans of the actual documents), so you might find this a hassle as well (but it is cheaper than the next option).

If you really want to do this right (and save your own time as well) the Copyright Office can verify copyright renewals for you for a per-hour fee. There is a document entitled “Copyright Status" available from the Copyright Office themselves outlining the process through which a person can verify the copyright renewal on any potential public domain work. The best part is that they also offer to certify the copyright search (for an extra hourly fee of course), as something that can ‘meet the evidentiary requirements of litigation’. In other words, the Copyright Office will provide you with a legal grounding for your endeavor if you choose to use a public domain work.

What about unpublished works? Whether you are in possession of an unpublished work or come to know of one, the process of determining its position is the same.

*Find out who the author is.

*Find out the date of creation.

With the name of the author, you can usually search the Internet to find any possible background information, and when they passed away. Using this information and the date of creation, you can then determine if the work is in the public domain.