Quote:
Originally Posted by Helsbelles
I know. But the ones that are just PD in the UK, you can't read for Librivox. They have to be PD in the US too.
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True. It would be nice to have an equivalent of Librivox for countries with a "life+70" copyright law.
I would note, though, that the overwhelming majority of books in the US public domain are in the public domain because they were published prior to 1923, and all such books that were initially published in the US are also in the UK public domain because of an aspect of British copyright law called "the rule of the shorter term", which states that if a work is in the public domain in the country in which it was originally published, then it's also in the public domain in the UK, even if the standard British "life+70" copyright term would indicate otherwise. This means that, for example, all the books by American authors such as Edgar Rice Burroughs which are in the public domain in the US are also in the UK public domain, even though Burroughs died in 1950.