The setting isn't download safe files, it's run safe files after downloading.
Not even close to the same thing.
And yes, even the existence of such a setting is stupid.
It looks to me like the Copyright Office accepted the renewal. Had they not, the record would/should show the original registration only, and you would be left to compute that since the original copyright was filed in 1954 and was not renewed, that the work was now in the public domain.
Also, the link you posted was for The Broken Sword, not for Brainwave.
"However, even if ‘The Escape” had not been published as a novel, it would have remained under copyright protection until 1981 (28 years) and been eligible for copyright renewal. Authors of that era, and Anderson in particular, were very aware of the need to renew copyrights, and typically meticulously kept their copyright protections up to date. Copyright law for works created more recently is much easier: life plus 70 years. (Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, 1998)."
-- is irrelevant because as a general rule of publishing in those magazines, copyright was assigned to the magazine. If the magazine screwed up and didn't renew its copyrights; or simply went out of business, in which case no one was tracking their assets; or got bought out by some other entity and the record keeping went all pear shaped, copyright did not magically revert to the author. Nor is there any precedent to have an author reassert their copyright claim on works that have been assigned to others. The instance in which the magazine did not file a copyright is obviously a specialized case.
Obviously, the biggest use of Flash on the web is embedded video, but this is hardly the only use, and those are seldom mentioned in the HTML5 v. Flash discussions. With Scribd converting to HTML5, the field seems to be opening up (though their use of Flash always struck me as being an anti-copying measure more than anything else).
So far as I know, HTML5 isn't suitable for things like graphical configurators or 3D models (allowing the user to rotate them) -- or is it? There's QTVR for 3D stuff, but it's always seemed clunky to me. And I haven't seen anything but Flash used for configurators. Are there actually reasonable alternatives to Flash for this sort of thing?
Enzymes are things invented by biologists that explain things which otherwise require harder thinking. -- Jerome Lettvin