This work published in Serbia is in the public domain because its copyright expired pursuant to the Yugoslav Copyright Act of 1978 which provided for copyright term of the life of the author plus 50 years, respectively 25 years for photograph or a work of applied art. This applies to works already in the public domain on or before December 29, 2004 when a new copyright act became valid.

The work meets one of the following criteria:

a) a work of known authorship and the author died before January 1, 1954

b) an anonymous work and it was published before January 1, 1954

c) a photograph or a work of applied art published before January 1, 1973

A source should be included so that the status can be verified.

Note that other works enter the public domain 70 years after the author's death or 70 years after publication if the work was published anonymously. If this is the case please use {{PD-old-70}}.

The copyright to this work was owned by the federal authorities of the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, whose assets are now held jointly by its successor states according to the Agreement on succession issues of 2004 [1]. The Yugoslav successor states have variously enacted legislation that places certain official state documents such as law texts into the public domain.

See e.g. Art. 8.2.1 of the copyright law of Croatia [2]: "official texts in the domain of legislation, administration, judiciary (acts, regulations, decisions, reports, minutes, judgments, standards, and the like) and other official works and their collections, which are published for the purpose of officially informing the public".

This template must not be used on its own. To establish PD status it must be used only with an appropriate license template such as {{PD-Croatia-exempt}}. You must make sure the file content has been declared as public domain by the laws of the relevant successor state.