User talk:Linda,LCADC

July 2008
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AA Copyright
There has no current US copyright on the text of Alcoholics Anonymous. It is in the public domain.

The 1986 General Service Conference Final Report admits as much:

The copyright on the first edition of the Big Book lapsed in 1967, and the copyright on the new material in the second edition lapsed in 1983-both because of a failure to renew them in a timely fashion. There was a mistaken belief that registering the copyright on the second edition in 1956 served to revive the copyright on the first edition; the misconception continued, with respect to the second edition, when the third edition was copyrighted in 1976. (From page 15)

See a more detailed discussion at http://aagso.de/1939/uslaw.htm, which claims that AA World Services has admitted that the original manuscript was distributed without copyright notice. This would indicate that under the copyright law at the time, it was within the public domain from the start. Also within that page are copies of AA literature from the 10th World Service Conference that explicitly states that AA acknowledges that the copyright of the original text has expired.--Advocate (talk) 20:41, 18 August 2008 (UTC)