Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve Jordan
A book's copyright notice should specify whether you have permission to convert or reproduce a book, or not. An example from a Penguin book I recently bought:
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Copyright holders commonly misstate their rights in such places, and those rights change over time. At the most basic level, copyright typically used to expire some years after the death of the author, so living authors couldn't really put an expiry date in the book. They also fall into the trap you do, of assuming that their work will only ever be available inside the jurisdiction they live in. As soon as someone moves the work in either time or space those assumptions might be invalid, and the applicable law might change too.
Example: DVDs in Australia often say "only legally permitted to be used in DVD region X" (or words to that effect), a statement which is false in Australia where region-coding has been declared not legally binding. Manufacturers who continue to print that on the DVDs they sell in Europe or the US are not being accurate, but it's in their interests to try to convince their customers of the lie in order to sell high-priced DVDs locally.
Example: music CDs also say I may not rip them. That too is explicitly legal in Australia.
You don't have to like the law, but you do have to accept that it exists.