Quote:
Originally Posted by Ankh
Last time that I checked, the employees in Canadian book stores were not asking for a proof of Canadian citizenship when....(etc)
|
No, nor are they required to. If you're buying the book in Canada, you're buying it in Canada; citizenship is not relevant.
However, with online sales the point of purchase is the nation where your butt is sitting on the couch, not the vendor's location. So if you are in the US (where the book is still protected by copyright) and the online retailer is in Canada (where it isn't), they are not allowed to sell you the public domain version.
I have no idea how the specifics would work in this case. However, I don't think that a fig leaf of a disclaimer is really sufficient, especially once a copyright holder starts to complain. The onus ought to be on Gutenberg to figure out how to respect the international copyrights while also granting access in the nations where the book is PD.
IMO, a basic IP geolocation that blocks non-Aussies from accessing those specific downloads would probably be a cheap, easy and acceptable solution -- or at least, preferable to pulling the ebook altogether, since it is legitimately a PD book in Australia.
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Ankh
If you are in favour of blocking, you should, really, petition your own government to employ such a technology.
|
No thanks. Even if there is a legal means by which governments can do so, IMO there are much better ways of handling it.
Plus, it seems to me that the whole point of Gutenberg is to both promote
and respect public domain, rather than to shove everything they possibly can into PD and thumb their nose at copyright holders.