[ATDrake]

Originally Posted by Kali Yuga

The idea that PG has absolutely no responsibility in this matter, and are incapable of doing anything at all to address it, just doesn't wash.

That is not what my post was saying at all.

In my view, PG has been acknowledging their responsibilities towards remaining international copyright-holders by putting up their repeated warning notices regarding the fact that public domain applies in their host country and not necessarily in the visitor's, please check your local laws.

And I did not say that they were incapable of addressing it, only that the methods proposed for the stringency you seem to require are impractical and unnecessarily restrictive for non-host-country-residents who may well be eligible under their own country's public domain terms.

Implementing them would seem to provide little benefit for either the site, its visitors, or even the hypothetical offended international copyright-holders, for a great deal of what seems like wasted effort relative to other things they are currently doing with their time and resources.

Originally Posted by Kali Yuga

• Use IP geolocation software to automatically determine the likely location of the downloader, and block specified nations.
• Only apply it when the rights holder complains.

http://www.ipligence.com/ for example offers IP geolocation info, with updates, for as low as $40/year. Obviously there's more to it than installing an app on a web server or two, but it's hardly like they will need to spend hundreds of hours per week blocking IP's.

Maybe not hundreds of hours per week, but very likely thousands of dollars per year.

That IPligence actually priced at license per server, and the cheap option has only a third of the database line records that the expensive ones do.

So in order to get the broadest number of applicable IP addresses and apply it across the board to all their load-distributing, backup, and mirror servers, it would probably work well into the high thousands, just to pre-emptively appease potential complainants that might someday materialize.

This seems a less-than-appropriate use of the donations people occasionally give them as thanks.

Originally Posted by Kali Yuga

Again I don't think they should pull the ebook altogether, but they should make a good-faith effort to honor international copyright laws while still distributing it as PD where applicable.

Personally, I think they've done so in a reasonable manner, and obviously, you think they don't, but we can agree to disagree.