Quote:
Originally Posted by Ankh
I do not think that Mobile Read has the same agenda as Project Gutenberg (and why it should?). Specifically, "Gone With The Wind" is in public domain in Canada, but when the estate threatened a legal action (which will inevitably fail if someone had a money and time to defend in the Canadian court of law), the book was removed from the e-book collection. Australian Project Gutenberg, however, still has the book in their collection, despite receiving similarly worded "greeting".
Do not get me wrong, I do not blame Mobile Read for avoiding that nightmare. I am just pointing out how costly and lengthy the defence of public domain can turn out. Which is, precisely, the reason why lawyer bullying works.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Kali Yuga
Not quite.
The problem is that a Gutenberg website in Australia is almost certainly not restricting its downloads to Australian citizens. As such, if a US citizen accesses Gone With the Wind from the Aussie site, that could present a legitimate issue.
Ebook retailers don't really have this problem, since in theory they have a verifiable method to determine the country where the buyer resides -- and an open website does not. Thus if a book is PD in England and copyrighted in the US, they can accommodate those different copyright term lengths.
It's also my understanding that if you were printing a paper copy and selling it in Australia, the Mitchell estate can't stop you unless you tried to export those books to the US for sale.
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This is exactly the issue I brought up in another thread with regard to MR and its library....
