Quote:
Originally Posted by tubemonkey
So when the law says life + 50 years, it's not really that clear cut and that determining the death of an author is really a complex, convoluted, legal nightmare?
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Not quite.
The problem is that a Gutenberg website in Australia is almost certainly not restricting its downloads to Australian citizens. As such, if a US citizen accesses
Gone With the Wind from the Aussie site, that could present a legitimate issue.
Ebook
retailers don't really have this problem, since in theory they have a verifiable method to determine the country where the buyer resides -- and an open website does not. Thus if a book is PD in England and copyrighted in the US, they can accommodate those different copyright term lengths.
It's also my understanding that if you were printing a paper copy and selling it in Australia, the Mitchell estate can't stop you unless you tried to export those books to the US for sale.