[Worldwalker]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

This is the tricky part. How do they tell?

They get a listing of titles daily from PG. They cross-check their newly submitted titles against that list (perhaps with soundex to catch some of the deliberately misspelled ones). If a book trips the "like a PG title" flag, a human checks it. "Hm, it's Dracula, doesn't say it's got anything added to it, so it's PD."

By the way, with regard to markup, there is, I believe, an exclusion for those things which are necessary. I could be wrong about this -- it's been a while since I looked -- but just converting something from plain text to HTML would not grant copyright because there are only a limited number of ways to display something as HTML, so there's no creativity or additional content added. If you wanted to put in a reader's guide to Dracula, let's say, there are a nearly infinite number of visibly different ways you could go about it; you're unlikely to do it the same way I would. If you mark it up as HTML, on the other hand, the odds are very good that you and I will come up with something very similar without ever knowing about each other, because it's a simple mechanical process. A paragraph is a paragraph. But again, I could be wrong on this, so don't depend on me!

This has come up several times in companies' attempts at copyrighting databases of publicly available facts. They can't take those facts out of the public domain -- your phone number is 123-4567, and it can't be anything else -- and what they do, anyone else can do. They're still trying, of course, and if we persist in ignoring our responsibilities as citizens, they may in time change that precedent and get away with it, but as of the last time I looked, you couldn't copyright the information in the phone book, nor the concept of having a list of names and phone numbers. You can copyright that exact phone book, but all that someone would need to do would be to shift the listing a bit so the pages aren't photocopies of yours and it's no copy.

Why are we letting this happen? I was in a store the other day looking at birdfeeders, and a company had TM symbols on things like "hanging birdfeeder". Every bloody company that sells a birdfeeder that hangs calls it a hanging birdfeeder, but they're trying to take those words out of the English language so they can use their "trademark" to attack other birdfeeder companies, and win in the courtroom what they can't win in the marketplace. Every company that sells canned fish food sells shrimp pellets; Wardley's is doing the same thing, putting a TM on their shrimp pellets so they can try to force other companies to call theirs something different (causing an expensive re-labeling of containers, etc., not to mention a hell of a lot of confusion among the customers about what to feed their fish). Copyright, patent, and trademark laws are no longer about "promotion of science and the useful arts", nor even about the protection of content creators. They're all about ways for big companies to attack smaller companies, and nobody is saying or doing anything.

The real political divide isn't between liberals and conservatives; it's between people who think "change" is a different set of special interests versus people who think the citizens ought to be considered, too. Should big companies be selling people something they can get for free, or should small companies be selling people something they can get for free? How about NO companies selling people something they can get for free -- citizens matter, not just companies. Citizens matter more than any entity. When did we start calling ourselves "consumers" instead of "citizens", anyway, defining ourselves by what we buy, not what we do?

Amazon could stop people from reselling public domain books with a day's worth of computer code. They won't. Some of those books might sell, which is good for Amazon, and the docile, complacent consumers who know better will say "well, there's no law saying they can't, and we don't have consciences or opinions anymore, we let the law do that for us, so we won't complain, let alone change our consuming habits." In getting away from Mrs. Grundy, we've outsourced our consciences to politicians. There is no negative payoff for a corporation that does anything they can argue in court is legal, because the no-longer-citizens will accept it if it's legal, and even if it isn't, they'll expect someone else to do something about it.

We don't create our world anymore. At most, we pick which of someone else's worlds we want to live in -- we pick one set of special interests or another and call it ours. It's more comfortable that way. It's easier. It's stable. It's such a brave new world. But is that what we want? If we don't, we can't let someone else do something about it. We have to be star throwers*. We have to stand up and say we care about more than what's legal or illegal, we care about what's right and wrong. And, yes, that can include telling Amazon that we, as readers, don't agree that they should help those people who buy "Make A Million Bucks Selling Public Domain Books" (yes, there are books like that, lots of them) fleece the unsuspecting. And, of course, we have to not be the unsuspecting. Because if we don't, there won't be any choices left for us.


*the essay is by Loren Eiseley; read it.