Where an author has sold "outright" all his right, title and interest in his work, it is possible that this may estop him from application for renewal or invalidate a renewal, but this question must be decided by the courts when a case arises. It is important that any contract between author and publisher should be clear and specific on this vexed question of rights for the renewal term. No provision is made for notification of renewal in the copyright notice, and therefore, after the expiration of the original term, information must be sought from the Copyright Office as to whether there has been renewal extension of the term. As it would be hazardous to omit the original copyright notice or to replace it by one giving the date of renewal, which might be construed to involve claim of a longer term and thus defeat itself, it may prove the wiser course to add to the official original notice, the unofficial notice "Copyright renewed, 19__." {Sidenote: Life term and beyond} The international copyright convention, as modified at the Berlin conference of 1908, adopted the term of life and fifty years,--previously in force in France and fourteen other countries,--subject to adoption by domestic legislation. A term of life and a specified number of years after the death of the author, preferably fifty years for personal works, and a term of fifty years for impersonal works, was advocated by the American Copyright leagues and other friends of copyright and was in the early drafts of the new copyright code. It was pointed out that Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier, Holmes and others outlived their earlier copyrights; that Edward Everett Hale, whose "Man without a country" did for this nation a patriotic service scarcely second to that of the great generals of the civil war, had no longer copyright in this work, although private soldiers, their relicts and descendants, were still paid pensions; and that many others of our foremost authors had been, or under the present system would be, deprived of their created property within their lifetime. The term advocated provides for the author and his children's children during the probable minority of the grandchildren, a period to which the entail of realty is limited by our laws. But the final decision of the Congressional Committees was for the simpler, though in other respects less satisfactory, period of twenty-eight years, as heretofore, with a renewal period of a second twenty-eight years, under the limitations above cited. No other countries, except Canada and Newfoundland, following our example, have this double or renewal term. {Sidenote: Unpublished works}