Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Do not forget, please, that you need to consider the copyright law in YOUR country too. You live in France, where the copyright law is "life + 70". You are committing an offence if you personally download a book which is still in copyright in your country. You need to decide for yourself whether or not this is an issue for you.
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That is a good point HarryT, however in the case of Dorothy Sayers
specifically i have already bought her books in french and also one or two in english, and given that the work is now in the public domain (even if not in France...) i feel that getting PD versions in the original english can be equated with format shifting (which i think is a completely fair use, as long as it is for personal use only) and i would not feel that i was being terribly immoral in downloading them.
i don't want to launch a debate about copyright laws, but i will add that i like to read a lot of classics and old books which can often be very hard to find because they are out of print and / or there is not a big demand for them (even used, especially in reasonable condition, or else only as a "collector's item" which is very expensive, especially since i don't want to keep a book wrapped up in tissue paper, i want to read it. and if i buy a used "collector's" book, it does not benefit in any way the author, only the person who is selling it and who had no hand in making it. that seems more of capitalistic interest than cultural, and capitalism and culture tend to make very poor bedfellows) . there have been many times when i have looked for a book that i want to read and been unable to buy it anywhere for these reasons, even though i was perfectly ready to pay for it. in these cases, if could find the book in the public domain (even if it's technically not in PD in France yet) i think i would be perfectly justified in downloading it and i would not hesitate.
i buy a lot of books and i feel that authors absolutely should be remunerated for their hard work, which i appreciate (the same goes for musicians and all artists ; i want to show my thanks to them for making something that i enjoy and i the obvious way to do this is to pay for it ; it goes beyond a legal question for me and is more a question of respect or ethics). however if the author has been dead for decades *and* i *cannot* buy the work because the publisher doesn't make it available, i think that the survival of cultural heritage becomes more important than jurisdiction.
i read somewhere that the Disney estate is preventing *any* new works from falling into the public domain in the united states because they don't want mickey mouse to fall into the public domain, so the rules continue to be extended every time that is in danger of happening. this seems to me a clear abuse of the concept and dangerous to the survival of other cultural artifacts which are affected by it (especially since, let's face it, Walt Disney is dead and his heirs are surely rich enough already).
public domain should be a compromise between rewarding the creators of works and making cultural heritage available to the population, for the survival of the precise things the laws supposedly want to protect. if a book is not in PD but is out of print and impossible or very very difficult to find, the end result can easily be that it becomes completely forgotten and lost to future generations.
preserving cultural works and allowing them to be transmitted to future generations seems to me to be just as important and for the same reasons of respect to the creator of them as monetary compensation when the author can benefit from it.
hm, now that i have wandered far far off topic i think i will end this post ! sorry for the long digression...