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Since Harry and Nate the GREAT have different opinions on the guidelines and the "facts" I'd say you don't have clear guidelines. Is there a post with guidelines written by someone who knows the law? Where is it? Or are we playing "interpret the law any way that we want it to go" again?
And I suppose I'll again say that a person or company (copyright holder) can extend a copyright so there are no blanket copyright laws that apply - this according to US law. You'd have to search for a current copyright on each individual book to be sure it hasn't been extended. I believe Gutenberg does this, that's why I intend to stick with distributing Gutenberg books or books with clear cc licenses: I don't have the time, knowledge, or money to go searching the copyright status of every book I might want to post online. And I don't want to illegally distribute anything. I'd rather distribute nothing than steal people's work.
I am thinking that if I copyright a book in the US then other countries don't have any right to decide it's legal to make and sell copies without my permission. There must be international copyright laws. MR could easily consult with a copyright attorney and have some legal guidelines written up.
And wikipedia is good (I love it) but is in no way a source of information you can consider to be accurate enough to use to make legal judgements.
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