Late in 2003, I discovered H.P. Lovecraft after playing Silicon Knights' Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem. I was intrigued by the game's Lovecraftian themes and I had to learn more about this writer and his works. Joyce Carol Oates' Tales of H.P. Lovecraft was my first introduction to his actual writings.

As I learned more, I was intrigued by the fact that no one seemed to know whether Lovecraft's stories were in the public domain or not. In this hyperconscious age of copyright, this seemed to be a silly question that remained unanswered. I figured that I could be the one to answer it, and thus I began this project.

The aim of my project is simple: I want to answer the question whether Lovecraft's stories are in the public domain or not. To this end, I have located and researched various theories that attempt to answer this question. Over the last three years, I have found

1. None of the copyrights to any of the individual Lovecraft stories were renewed in the 1950's as required by that time's copyright laws. Arkham House did renew the copyrights to their Lovecraft compilations, but these renewals protect the arrangement of the works and not the individual stories within. For more details, see "A Report on the Copyright Renewals of the Works of H.P. Lovecraft".

2. The copyrights to the issues of Weird Tales containing Lovecraft stories were renewed. However, in 1947, Weird Tales sold their rights to the Lovecraft materials to Arkham House. It is unclear what rights that Weird Tales actually owned, but it is believed that after 1926, Lovecraft began reserving the full rights for himself. It is also unclear whether the Weird Tales renewals applied to the rights that Arkham House purchased.

3. After the death of August Derleth in the 1970's, his partner Donald Wanrdrei sued his estate for royalties and rights due to him as a consequence of the partner's death. During the course of the litigation, the attorney overseeing both Derleth's estate and Arkham House testified that Wandrei was not owed anything because the Lovecraft works entered the public domain due to the lack of copyright renewal.

I've collected and organized my findings in an article entitled "The Black Seas of Copyright: An investigation into the copyright status of the H.P. Lovecraft fiction". This article has been converted into full hypertext, with links to external resources and PDF scans of some of the primary documents cited. (I am scanning and uploading as I find the free time.) This article represents my most current thinking on this matter.