Quote:
Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg
I guess I'm at fault for having oversimplified. It's not really true that The Murder on the Links will only be public domain, in the US, next January. For example, according to Wikipedia:
-- Colombia is Life + 80
-- Yemen is Life + 30
-- Eritrea is 50 years after publication
-- The Marshall Islands doesn't have copyright
Smaller countries don't count? In my opinion, that would be unprincipled. Blocking, say, Yemen -- or South Korea -- just because it's a pain to differentiate it from Europe, would be disrespectful to their readers. Also, bigger countries may have more complex laws having exceptions only found in case law. In order to really say that a book is, or is not, in the public domain, in even one foreign country, would take a long legal analysis by someone familiar with how to do legal research in that nation. It might even be that there's no real way to know a nation's policy, on old-book copyright, without a court case.
By giving in to the German courts, and blocking their site in Germany, even temporarily, Project Gutenberg is going down an impractical road. |
Speaking as a retired DBA, If their database is reasonably structured, It would be a small problem to add PD expiration dates in an array of 10 year increments from 20 to 100 to the records of catalogued books. Then when someone tries to download a book, their location is identified and the proper ability to DL is either granted or denied based on a simple country look up table.
The problem, of course, is databases like this are rarely designed for easy modification. In fact, databases built for many not for profit projects aren't designed at all, but are haphazardly slapped together over time by people with minimal knowledge of what good database design actually is!
I don't know anything about Project Gutenberg's database, but based on my experience of 30 years, I suspect it is closer to the latter than the former! All it will take to fix this, is time and money!