Quote:
Originally Posted by Ken Irving
You can't steal something from the public domain, period; nor by doing what was described above can you convert a public domain to your exclusive commercial use, period. What you can do is take a public domain work, stick it in a book, and copyright whatever is copyrightable in your particular edition. For example, if a publisher decides Great Expectations would look perfect if all the a's were changed to x's and published it that way, then maybe someone doing the same could be sued for infringement. More to the point if you do what Barnes and Nobles did with their Classics series, which is to add commentary, footnotes, you can't simply copy one of their editions, because the commentary and notes and the nice cover are copyrightable. But that does not in any way remove the original work from the public domain.
|
Agreed. But the fact that the books is really in public domain is irrelevant, what matters is that it's not available as public domain book because of copyfraud.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ken Irving
Anyone who is running a business on that basis might scam a few people into thinking that they actually own public domain works, but if they try to get infringement money from someone it will backfire, and they will be the ones in legal trouble.
|
That's not how they think. They won't try to get infringement money. They say those are their copyrighted works only to get Google Books, and possible other sites offering public-domain material for download to disallow access to it. This way they have less competition. It doesn't matter if it's legal or not, if the net effect will be that they're the only source of those books in the world.
It's analogous to how piracy works:
- Many people violate copyright and download pirate books ( = publishers committing copyfraud claim many books as their own)
- The cost of process of suing them all and proving they committed illegal acts is prohibitive ( = the process of determining if each of the many books is really a public domain one, and not copyrighted is prohibitive)
- The net effect is that many people have illegally obtained books and aren't afraid of legal repercussions ( = the publisher is the sole source of the copyfrauded books, and is also apparently not afraid of legal repercussions)
I hope the process of determining that some publishing company actively hinders the availability of public domain books could be performed on company basis, ie. by looking at all the books it claims to have at the same time, and not having to consider each books separately, and that Google Books will figure out a way to detect and defeat those attempts. In piracy's case, each downloader really has nothing to do with each other so suing them can't be streamlined.