Quote:
Originally Posted by BookCat
Strange. I thought that L M Montgomery's books had been PD in the UK for years! I have read several of the "Anne" books on my ereader.
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Perhaps you found them here on MR which uses the Canadian life+50 rules?
Or I suppose you could have found them on project Gutenberg Australia based on the posts in this thread, since it would have adopted the shorter term for Montgomery's books that were published in Canada.
The copyright terms are a confusing mess and the world wide web doesn't have physical geographic barriers making the whole system (such as it is) irrelevant.
Quote:
Originally Posted by caleb72
This stuff is so confusing. Given the extremely easy and carefree way we can break the law if we want to, it certainly makes me sorely tempted to consistently apply whatever law I think makes sense and damn everything else.
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Yeah, I personally apply the "if it's in the public domain somewhere, it's fair game" rule. Since I'm in Canada which has life+50, this is mostly valid for me anyway, but there are still some US works that are PD there and not here. My rule of thumb is of course not legal, but is practical since anything in the public domain somewhere is available online.