If you think that any book that's posted here is in violation of copyright law, please report it by sending an e-mail to abuse@mobileread.com and we will investigate and take any necessary action.

Please note that copyright laws differ all over the world, and that a book which is still under copyright in one country may very well be in the public domain, and hence legally downloadable, in another country. Before downloading a book, please check whether or not it is legal for you to do so, based on the copyright laws of your own country.

Thank you for your cooperation in this.

It should also be noted that sometimes the original book is out of copyright but not a specific translation of that book. This is true for some of the texts used in the Harvard Classics series. Thankfully, all of the translations used there are in the public domain.

Likewise, even if a book is completely out of copyright but is electronically published by a company, they still have the rights to that presentation of the book and it cannot be posted to MobileRead without the permission of the company. We could of course go to Project Gutenberg (as an example), get the same text, convert it to a form for upload at MobileRead, and then upload it to MobileRead without permission from the company that published the other version of the public domain text.

It occurs to me that there is another copyright issue too. We probably have copyright in our own editions of lrf books. Some of us have spent a lot of time editing and reformatting them.

I'm entirely happy to post up my own books for other people to use freely for their own use, or to share with others. After all, I got them freely from PG and elsewhere. And I've been using vvv's splendid (and free) Bookdesigner.

But were anyone to download them, then sell them for profit then I would consider my copyright to be infringed. But I may be wrong about this...?

If you donate your work as public domain then you have to live with it. anyone can then make a profit from it.
If you do not want this you have to keep your copyright and use a permissive license like one of the Creative Commons licenses.

If you donate your work as public domain then you have to live with it. anyone can then make a profit from it.
If you do not want this you have to keep your copyright and use a permissive license like one of the Creative Commons licenses.

I think personally that this is a complete "non issue".

If the posted book contains the PG licence agreement, then that agreement states what can and cannot be done with the book.

If the book doesn't contain the PG licence agreement, then it is protected by copyright law even if you don't put a copyright notice in it, and you have the absolute right to control its distribution and copying.

This applies in every country which is a signatory of the Berne Copyright Convention - ie practically every country in the world.

I think Patricia would find it hard to defend her inherent copyright without a copyright statement, or any other mark of identification, present in the work. Moreover, anyone (for fun or profit) can assert that they created Patricia's work, and ask you to remove it from the forum.

Oh I agree with you - if you WANT to control distribution it makes sense to put a copyright statement in the book. Technically speaking, however, it is not required, and one could, if challenged, provide evidence such as the source from which the book was created.

However, I think we all create books here specifically to BE re-distributed, so "copyrighting" our work seems a little unnecessary.

We could always offer the converted books under a Creative Commons (http://creativecommons.org/) copyright. Would that be an option?

As i said the donor should state the license of the work on upload. Acceptable should only be a Creative Commons license or Public Domain. Alternatively like on LibriVox all donors accept Public Domain by doing the upload.

Certainly, yes!

I don't know if it's easily feasible (from a programming point of view), but we could have something like "This work is protected under a Commons Creative license" automatically show up under each first post in the Upload sections, to prohibit others from selling the work.

Moreover, anyone (for fun or profit) can assert that they created Patricia's work, and ask you to remove it from the forum.Of course the date on the post, which pre-dated their possession of the work they claimed to have created (which they just swiped from here) would tend to dilute such claims a bit.

May I respectfully suggest you let people protect their works in the way and to the extent they wish, rather than imposing a system. Patricia can insert a copyright statement, or statement of origin, or CC license into her ebook if she likes. I prefer to use a copyright statement, which in my understanding allows the uses I wish to permit (viewing, reading, downloading -- implied by the act of posting) and blocks uses I don't (all others, eg. reposting, republishing, including the work in disk compilations etc.)

I don't really understand NatCh's point. Pardon me for misstating it, if I do, in the interest of having it clarified. He seems to say that it would easy for Patricia to prove that her edition of Villete, marked 05/06/2007 by BD, was not created, say, by me, on May 6th, acquired by her several weeks later, and posted without permission on June 5th.

Your copyright in the book will not stop reposting. I've seen the books posted here in Sony format reported on Usenet. So no, just because you say mo, doesn't make it so.

Your copyright in the book will not stop reposting. I've seen the books posted here in Sony format reported on Usenet. So no, just because you say mo, doesn't make it so.

But the Usenet eBook groups exist primarily for the purpose of distributing illegal, copyrighted material. One can, with the use of appropriate copyright message, prevent more "legitimate" re-distribution by people re-selling one's eBooks.

May I respectfully suggest you let people protect their works in the way and to the extent they wish, rather than imposing a system. Patricia can insert a copyright statement, or statement of origin, or CC license into her ebook if she likes. I prefer to use a copyright statement, which in my understanding allows the uses I wish to permit (viewing, reading, downloading -- implied by the act of posting) and blocks uses I don't (all others, eg. reposting, republishing, including the work in disk compilations etc.).

Sounds good. I was just thinking of ways to make it easier :D

Your copyright in the book will not stop reposting. I've seen the books posted here in Sony format reported on Usenet. So no, just because you say mo, doesn't make it so.

I wouldn't be so afraid of reposting. What would suck is if someone tried to resell the books.

On cue, JSWolf points out the obvious. The copyright asserts the right, it does not enforce it. We're all aware of the difficulties of defending rights, as well as the harm caused by misguided attempts at over-enforcement (see RIAA). Asserting my copyright does not oblige me to enforce it in every case.

I don't think the books will be resold just becaus eof being posted on Usenet. But, I do think that if anyone hwere thinks a copyright will stop reposting other places is quite naive.

I don't believe that anyone is suggesting that, Jon. The advantage of having a copyright message is that it would give one a means of doing something about a particular distribution which one found particularly irksome, such as someone re-selling one's hard work on a web site, for example.

My suggestion, if the Creative Commons license sounds good to you, use their online tool (http://creativecommons.org/license/) to pick a license, and name it in your e-book work and/or the upload thread.

Example for a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 License:

http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-nc/3.0/88x31.png
Info (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/)

I wouldn't be so afraid of reposting. What would suck is if someone tried to resell the books.

this issue has arisen again in a piracy thread. I know this thread is pretty old but I do like the idea of automatically restricting commercial use of posted books. I think we should say at least:

These eBooks can be downloaded for non-commercial use but you cannot sell them. You can give them to your friends under the same terms or tell them where they can download the latest version. These rules apply unless a specific statement is made in the thread containing the uploaded eBook.

Or something similar. I think forcing the uploader to spell out this basic level of copyright is a hardship as does the US government which is why they decided to automatically do it.

Dale

I have taken some of the books from here and checked in in the developer hub as test cases for MobiPerl and they are publicly available. That was a case I thought about what to do but I checked them in and if somebody complain I will remove them. In that case a statement here will not help so much. And I have also checked in old versions of books because they were better test cases...

I have taken some of the books from here and checked in in the developer hub as test cases for MobiPerl and they are publicly available. That was a case I thought about what to do but I checked them in and if somebody complain I will remove them. In that case a statement here will not help so much. And I have also checked in old versions of books because they were better test cases...

You are very welcome to repost any of my books anywhere you wish.

If you think that any book that's posted here is in violation of copyright law, please report it by sending an e-mail to abuse@mobileread.com and we will investigate and take any necessary action.

So you're only concerned with books? I am curious about the copyright status of your avatar picture, but happy to accept that you took the photo yourself if you say so. http://www.mobileread.com/forums/member.php?u=5306 is very unlikely to be a legal use of that image IMO.

I am curious about the copyright status of your avatar picture, but happy to accept that you took the photo yourself if you say so.We've been through that before a few times. HarryT's avatar pic is one that was taken of a model-maker's model. The pic itself is one he has every relevant right and permission to use.

While Daleks are probably trademarked, he's not using it for trade, so that's not a concern: there's no infringement from taking pictures of something that someone else has trademarked, as long as you don't try to use it commercially yourself. And that's pretty murky, as it happens: how many movies don't contain shots with some sort of trademarked image in them (consider any street scene, for instance)?

The pic itself is one he has every relevant right and permission to use.

The latter point is the one that counts. Which is why I'd like to know more about the picture Dave Berk is using. It seems very Herge-like for a cariciture.

It's a good question, and one I don't feel at all qualified to give any sort of definitive answer to, but I expect that it would fall under "fair use" to take a small chunk of an image and use it for totally non-commercial use, as he's doing.

There are probably literally hundreds of avatars here that would fit the same description. :shrug: