Quote:
Originally Posted by acidzebra
Because if that is the case, my torrent is perfectly legal - my script merely grabbed anything with numerical characters.
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It's perfectly legal for folks in the US. The main PG archive follows US copyright law, which is quite different from most other countries. As a rule of thumb, anything published anywhere in the world before 1923 is public domain in the US. Most other countries determine public domain by when the author died, with copyrights expiring 50-70 years after the author dies. So some books that are in the public domain in the US will not be in most of the rest of the world, and vice versa.
Project Gutenberg Australia, PG Canada, and PG Europe are all located in life+50 countries so they can contain material that is not legal for the original PG.
Some countries will allow download of a single copy for personal use only of some kinds of electronic material. Others are very strict about not doing that. Trying to keep track of all the variation in copyright laws across countries, and all the variations in "fair use" etc, is a monumental task that PG cannot begin to accomplish authoritatively. That's why there's a statement associated with each public-domain-in-the-US book advising all users to be sure that downloading it is legal under the laws of their country.
IANAL, but it's safe to say that the legality of your download varies by the country the downloader is in. PG does make some of its CD images available via bit torrent. I think, although I'm not sure, that they put some sort of disclaimer in it about carefully considering the copyright laws of the country that you are in. You might check to see how they handle it.
JulietS
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