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Old 11-28-2015, 04:53 PM   #6
skreutzer
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Location: Germany
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Jellby View Post
but it also holds other books which are not public domain, including (but not limited to): copyrighted translations uploaded to Project Gutenberg, for which redistribution is allowed (probably with some conditions); [...]; works uploaded by the author (whether or not it is OK to redistribute them, is up to the author, we only know we can host them, because the author uploaded them).
And this breaks it for me completely, because neither in the threads nor in the lists nor in the index I can learn about which is which. And maybe you can't too, as users become inactive. If users want to make use of the uploaded texts (redistribution, for instance), which a basically life+70 library suggests to be permitted, they have to re-evaluate the legal status individually for every work over and over again.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Jellby View Post
Not being a lawyer in any country, my opinion is that if you download the whole library and host it elsewehere, you may be doing something wrong. If you provide a tool that someone can use to download books (which they can easily and legally download otherwise, anyway) and they decide to disregard any possible copyright/license and distribute them... well, I can't say you're to blame, not more than MR.
I didn't do so and don't intend to do so, but that's what almost certainly happens. My validator startet out because a user asked for a way to download all EPUBs in the German Wiki list automatically. He has done it by hand, and that's quite a painful process. As I'm an publishing automation guy and was naively thinking the library is in Public Domain, I wrote a downloader, and the user immediately uploaded the works immediately at some other web space publicly [1]. Uploaders of restrictively licensed works complained, and the link was removed (I don't know, however, if the files are still available publicly at this or at other locations). After some time, I attached epubcheck to my already existing downloader, because obviously I can't epubcheck files without downloading them first. Additionally, without having a library of Public Domains only, people can't mirror those works on other places and everyone who wants to download the whole library, will do so separately using your resources exclusively (and my downloader just invites them to do so).

Quote:
Originally Posted by Jellby View Post
well, I can't say you're to blame, not more than MR.
I hope so, yes, because I only retrieved copies and never distributed them. The main difference here is that MR has permissions from the uploaders while I have none, and by providing a tool to obtain the whole library at once, users of it might be unaware that the library is in part restrictively licensed. I might have to notify them that they're obliged to use the library only privately except they can resolve the legal status of individual files. By using the downloader, they don't get to see any legal notices for instance.


[1] In some ways, that was very kind of him, because the download takes around 6+ hours, as there is a delay of 5 seconds (an eternity) between two downloads, and every download of the whole library from his server would have saved mobileread resources.

Last edited by skreutzer; 11-28-2015 at 04:58 PM.
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