The use of the date of publication as the beginning of the copyright term and the specification of twenty-eight years and twenty-eight years for its duration, obviates questions as to anonymous and pseudonymous works, composite works or works of joint authorship. The earlier drafts of the bill, providing for a term through and beyond life, made the lifetime of the last surviving author the basis for the term of copyright on works of joint authorship. This method was interestingly applied in the German courts, when it was held as to the opera "Carmen" that Bizet's music was out of copyright, but that the libretto was protected because one of its three joint authors was still living. {Sidenote: Termination by forfeiture or laches} A copyright is terminated _ipse facto_ by forfeiture as provided in the act, either because of failure to deposit copies after notice from the Copyright Office (sec. 13), or because of false affidavit of American manufacture (sec. 17). It may also be terminated by _laches_, that is, carelessness in protecting one's rights, as by omission of the notice, unless by accident or mistake, from particular copies (sec. 20). {Sidenote: Abandonment} A copyright may be terminated by voluntary abandonment or purposed dedication as well as by expiration, forfeiture or _laches_. Thus in 1854 Congress purchased for $10,000 the copyright of Sumner's new method of ascertaining a ship's position, dedicated the method to general public use, and extinguished the copyright. The Copyright Office has no authority to recognize annulments, but it has noted request for annulment when received on the registry. In 1910 the Oxford University Press, American Branch, formally notified the Treasury Department that they abandoned the copyright on Oxford Cyclopaedic Concordance copyrighted by them in 1903, and collectors of customs were accordingly authorized by circular letter of January 25, 1910, to permit importation "of any copies of the said work with the notice of the copyright obliterated, or a notice of the abandonment of the copyright plainly printed upon the same page with the notice of copyright and adjacent thereto." This last was a curious "boomerang" effect of the manufacturing clause as extended to binding in the act of 1909. {Sidenote: In England}