[skreutzer]

Thanks for this clarification! If the only license other than life+70/CC0 is the CC BY-SA-NC, that would be fine because works of art and entertainment would still be considered as freely licensed under this license (but not works of practical use, non-fiction). The task for me would be to identify the EPUBs under CC BY-SA-NC, so I can download them into a separate directory like “non-commercial-only” in order to make sure that users who have obtained the full collection don't run into some legal trouble. Ideally, the posting guidelines and the copyright notice in the upload posts should reflect that the material can also be under CC BY-SA-NC, and the statement “the copyright holder has given specific permission for distribution” would be less ambiguous (because it sounds like restrictive licensing, at least every user has to assume it because the default is “all rights reserved”).

Originally Posted by beachwanderer

If the font page contains a design that qualifies as a new work of craft or art, copyright exists for the creator. If the front page contains any photography which was created by the person who did create the front page, copyright for the photographer exists. This is, of course, also true for any such works embedded in the text of the ebook. As a result there could be claims concerning the complete ebook-file.

I case of splitting front page (or illustrations) and text, the next question that arises would be that of the protection of a special layout, special fonts etc. etc.

Originally Posted by DaleDe

The cover is indeed an illustration but often the book itself also has illustrations which are covered by a second copyright. A translation also has a separate copyright.

But how would this not conflict with the posting guidelines? Just like the Wikipedia: if submitting anything, one accepts that the submitted content will be under CC BY-SA, or he is not allowed to upload it at all. Is mobileread any different?

Originally Posted by beachwanderer

My expectation would be that if one tries (after loads and loads of interesting legal review of masses of individual titles) to make the whole library compliant to the project you have in mind, another library, or rather two or more of them would result and much be lost.

At the moment, I don't have a particular project in mind, but I do think about the concept of a universal digital library, which of course needs to be in the Public Domain and freely licensed, with software and services around it, and of a certain quality. Everyone could obtain a copy of it in full or in part, but the main home of such library would be determined by the community and service providers working on and with those texts. Of course, people could use my downloader and upload the downloaded files to their servers and distribute the e-books, and I think there's nothing wrong with it (is it?), but still visitors of that site can't get updates, can't give feedback, etc. Regarding the name of Patricia Clark Memorial Library, as she was a major uploader, a universal library would contain contributions from all kinds of people and institutions, and copies of the current mobileread library hosted somewhere else could be given another name (and should be, if the hoster starts to modify stuff with which mobileread doesn't necessarily agree or which would conflict with Patricia Clarks personal rights). However, we could add an automatically generated EPUB about the history of the uploads and statistics about the uploaders and link to it in the other EPUBs (just an idea).

If you have the time and interest, you could also consider some of the theoretical background, see Google and the World Brain for instance. I don't want some big company to build such a library to nastily exploit it, I would rather favor the public to take care of it for ourselves.

Currently, the downloaded EPUBs are some kind of data pool for me to experiment with EPUBs, to start to read and extract information from them, maybe for automatically generate indexes or PDFs, I'm not so sure about it right now. Especially as around half of the German ones are invalid, so there might be better sources somewhere.

Originally Posted by DaleDe

When known, all of these things were considered when the mod's reviewed the works for the latest pass at purging the books that were non-compliant. Of course we are only human. If you find any errors report them to the mods via the little ! symbol under the poster's name.

And I really appreciate that! I think it would be catastrophic if you didn't, but now there's at least the chance to do interesting things with what you've accomplished so far.