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Originally Posted by Raphi'Elohim
Ok, so let us take John Paul Sartre's books on philosophy or maybe Albert Camus' books. They are not available on project Gutenberg but Arthur Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein are. Why ? Probably because of what Pwalker8 mentioned.
John Paul Sartre's book "No Exit" was published in 1944. Let us say his relatives own the intellectual property to the book and are making money off it.
A person shares 3.13%, on average, genetically or DNA-wise with their second cousins. So the relatives profiting off the book currently would be like strangers or almost strangers genetically to Sartre so it makes no logical sense scientifically as we share like 99% of our DNA with bonobo chimps or monkeys.
Also, maybe relatives are not profiting but actual complete strangers in a publishing house/company.
I might also add I read all of Schopenhauer's works available on Gutenberg and I noticed that last one I read only had 144 downloads. Do you really think "No Exit" would have a ton of downloads ?
So no one would be making a lot of money off it, anyway.
It seems to me people might be making a mountain out of a molehill here or maybe I am just doing a weird analysis that is also limited myopically in scope.
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Schopenhauer died in 1860, so everything he wrote is PD, and assuming his works had all been translated by 1922, have English translations at PG, too. Wittgenstein's one non-posthumous work was published in 1921, so it's PD in US and life+50 countries (2022 pretty much everywhere), although it looks like either no English translation occurred in 1923, or nobody's provided it to PG yet. Camus wrote all of his works in 1935 or later, so they won't be showing up at PG until the 2040s or later, although he's PD in Canada and other life+50 countries now, and in 2031 pretty much elsewhere. Sartre started writing in the late 1930s and died in 1980, so his works will be the last of these 4 to reach PD status, in the 2040s and later (assuming Canada capitulates and goes to life+70 too).
It's hard to say why there are not many downloads of Schopenhauer from PG. Perhaps he's not taught in English speaking colleges and universities very often, or when he is, the professors require specific translations which are not PD.
Even though it's not PD, Internet Archive has a English translation of "No Exit", and it's had about 147 thousand downloads since it was uploaded in 2011. Perhaps it's more popular because it's taught in English-speaking schools? Sartre was an only child, and didn't have any kids, he had been in a long term relationship with Simone de Beauvoir. His literary estate went to her and after her death went to her adopted daughter, so she's probably missing out on at least $150,000, assuming that US royalties would run about $1 per copy. Should you care whether an unrelated person who I suspect got adopted by his partner shortly before or after his death (although he probably knew her for 20 years) is getting income from it 40 years after his death? My guess is that most of those 147k people don't care, even if leebase does. For the record, I'm probably one of the 147k downloads because I was searching for "No Exit" on Google, saw it was on IA, and was expecting the link to go to the overview showing the metadata (like download count) instead of the actual text. I read the first paragraph. I don't care.