If you thought that all works by Lord Byron or William
Shakespeare would definitely be out of copyright now, you
wouldn't necessarily be right.
The general rule of UK copyright law is that copyright in a
literary work lasts from the date of its creation until 1 January
in the year following 70 years from the death of its author. So on
that construction, Byron and Shakespeare's works are certainly
in the public domain. But there is a little-known exception which
would apply to any works by Byron or Shakespeare that have not been
published, known as the "2039 rule".
Before the introduction of the current copyright law in the 1988
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act (CDPA), copyright works were
protected in two different ways. Works published during the
author's lifetime were protected for a fixed number of years
after the author's death. But works which were not published
until after the author's death were protected by copyright for
a fixed number of years after the
