Quote:
Originally Posted by ricdiogo
Indeed. PG needs a copy of the title page. If the book was published in 1922 or prior it's in the public domain in the USA.
Please mind that PG only takes in consideration USA's law. PG's ebooks can be read by everyone living in the USA. If you live elsewhere you need to check if the book is in public domain in your own country.
A book published in the USA in 1920 from an author who died in 1950: - can be published, redistributed, downloaded and read in the USA (i. e. by/from PG);
- can be published, redistributed, downloaded and read in Canada (i. e. by/from MR)
- can not be published, redistributed, downloaded and read in the European Union.
Copyright laws are hard to understand, complex, different from country (countries tend to disagree in what concerns copyright law).
@ cmbs: I am a lawyer with a pos-graduation in copyright law. You can certainly pay me 200 dollars per hour so that I can write up some guidelines for MR. 
If a book in the public domain in Canada but it is not in the public domain in the US (where you live), you CAN NOT upload it to MR under US law but MR CAN certainly publish it |
If this were my website, it would be worth it to me to pay an attorney to provide some guidelines because we are talking about potentially illegal activities here. But I don't have money to be hiring lawyers for MR. It is nice to know someone here knows some of this stuff though.
If a book is in the public domain in Canada but not in the US I also shouldn't be downloading it, right? So just because a book is on this site, and is legal for the site to distribute it, doesn't mean it's legal for everyone to download it. Right?
All this could go on the copyright page.