Quote:
Originally Posted by Kali Yuga
The onus ought to be on Gutenberg to figure out how to respect the international copyrights while also granting access in the nations where the book is PD.
IMO, a basic IP geolocation that blocks non-Aussies from accessing those specific downloads would probably be a cheap, easy and acceptable solution -- or at least, preferable to pulling the ebook altogether, since it is legitimately a PD book in Australia.
|
The thing is, if it's a public domain book in Australia, then it's also a public domain book in other Life+50 countries like Canada. Blocking all non-Australians from those particular books seems unfairly restrictive, and there's the additional consideration that PG Australia also hosts works by authors dead long enough that they would be PD in countries with longer copyright spans as well, or Life+50 authors with pre-1923/copyright-not-renewed titles that are eligible in the US while the rest of their works might not be.
The overhead it would take in terms of both human working hours and server resources to even try and selectively deny particular page/file access based not only on originating visitor IP, but also date of death/original publication of the work and list of acceptable countries for each, would be far better spent on other things.
An international ebookstore like Kobo has incentive to work that way (and this in fact is exactly how Kobo works, sparing its customers from the disappointment of geo-restrictions by just not showing them the non-eligible books at all). A non-profit volunteer organization like Gutenberg doesn't. And then there are the mirror sites to consider.
Also, I find that their notices are fairly prominent, across all the Project Gutenbergs (Projects Gutenberg?). A big obvious text block on their various front pages states that their books are public domain in the host country.
Another smaller notice is posted on each of the initial pages you click through to get to the final download link.
Project Gutenberg, whether in the US, Australian, or Canadian flavours, seems to have made a reasonable accommodation towards the acknowledging the differing copyright lengths of other countries while presenting public domain books to people who may well be eligible to download them, regardless of location respective to the PG host.
And they do respond when copyright holders contact them with legitimate complaints,
as the other thread shows.
The task of ensuring their public domain books are being downloaded by eligible readers seems like it should not lie on them, but on the readers themselves, just like it's on the individual not to abuse any service that clearly and repeatedly spells out the rules, and not on the service to hedge itself about to the point where it begins to hobble its intended purpose, on the assumption that everyone is a potential abuser just waiting for their chance.
Unless it
wants to do things that way.