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Originally Posted by kovidgoyal
Again, selling an exact duplicate of a PD ebook and not informing the people you are selling it to that it is an exact duplicate of a PD work is vraud.
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Please stop it with the "vraud" stuff. It's not helping.
And no, there is absolutely no obligation to notify anyone that you are charging for something that another person is giving away.
If I buy a car, the dealer is not obliged to say his competition will undercut him by $500. If I buy a name-brand cereal, the manufacturer is not obliged to tell me the store brand is identical and half the price. If I go to Tourneau corner and ask to see a $1000 precision hand-made mechanical watch, the staff are not obligated to tell me that it's functionally identical to a $500 mechanical watch, or functionally inferior to a $25 digital watch.
The only way that selling a PD book would be unethical is if you attempted to copyright the PD material and subsequently control what gets done with it. And that is not what's happening here.
This is not like an open source project, where the individual(s) who put in effort get to control subsequent and derivative uses. Open source works
because the code is protected by copyright. Public domain works are 100% out in the public. If a volunteer chooses to openly release it in a digital form, they should not have any illusions about it being exclusively released for free in all iterations thereafter -- because they have no rights in this regard.
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Originally Posted by kovidgoyal
Step out of your own shoes for a minute and imagine you are someone who knows nothing about copyright or public domain and just wants to read a book by, say Jane Austen. You therefore google "Pride and Prejudice" and the first link you find is Pride and Prejudice on Amazon.com being sold for $10.....
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http://www.lmgtfy.com/?q=pride+prejudice+ebook
Also, the free version comes up first with Amazon's listings.
And of course, every major ebook retailer touts all the free books you can get that are compatible with their devices / systems. I really see no reason to fear here.
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Originally Posted by kovidgoyal
To re-iterate, ebooks are different.
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Not in this regard.
Once a book is in public domain, that is it. Copyright is finished, done, taken down, game over. If you add new
content -- an introduction, insert material about a zombie attack -- that portion is copyrighted and protected (and ONLY that portion).
It doesn't matter if someone else did the hard work of OCR'ing and proofreading, or retyping. PG did not add any new content, therefore they cannot copyright it.
In fact, if PG
did try to insist that "their" ebooks could not be duplicated and distributed, THAT would be an instance of "copyfraud" -- because it would be an instance of them attempting to assert control over a public domain work.
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Originally Posted by kovidgoyal
You do not provide that service with an ebook.
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That's nice, but completely irrelevant.
You're expecting to impose copyright on a book where the copyright has expired. It's a contradiction, and therefore is not valid.