A work can be in the public domain in Europe and still under copyright in the United States. The two systems use different rules — death of the maker in one, date of publication in the other — and the gap between them is where most reproduction businesses get into trouble. How we handle it, and what it costs us.
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In 1515 an Indian rhinoceros reached Lisbon. A letter and a rough sketch travelled north to Nuremberg, and Albrecht Dürer cut a woodcut of an animal he never laid eyes on. He got the skin wrong, added a horn that does not exist, and repeated a fable from Pliny in the text above. Europe drew its rhinoceroses his way for the next two hundred and fifty years.
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