|
Just because it's available on-line through Trove does NOT make it out of copyright. Copyright in Australia is based on the date of death of the author, and has two legs.
Until recently Australia was a life +50 country but then extended it to Life +70. It did not re-copyright anything that had already been in the PD under life+50 but started a new regime.
While you can read anything on Trove free, including works by authors whose works are still copyright, and you can (arguably) download such copyright material for strictly your own use, you cannot then copy it to someone else, or publish it.
There is nothing in Australian copyright law that makes everything on Trove in the PD. The Act would have to make an explicit provision to that effect, and it doesn't. Trove is a research facility.
Those people who download from Trove and make it available on legitimate sites, here or elsewhere, as ebooks, make sure that it is out of copyright first. Thus the collections of Mark Hellinger (d. 1947) stories I placed on Mobile Read are PD in Australia and in the Life +70 Public Domain, or I wouldn't have done it. Similarly, the Aiden de Brune (d 1946) serials on Project Gutenberg Aust and Roy Glashan's Library are PD in Australia and in all L+70 jurisdictions. Neither of these two e-book libraries will accept anything not in the Australian PD.
|