Quote:
Originally Posted by Elfwreck
If the text is in the public domain, you should be able to sell it; you just can't prevent someone else from selling or giving away another version of the text. (How much the formatting is copyrighted is a blurry area of the law. It's agreed that it's copyrighted, and so someone else couldn't legally grab your version & sell it... but it's unclear whether they could grab your version, throw it into Calibre, and sell whatever output they derived from that.)
You're also allowed to both sell it & give it away; you could put a free version at Mobileread and a $1 at Amazon. Certainly Sony & Amazon both sell versions of public domain works that are available here for free (and the ones here are better, which makes buying from them even less desirable). If you charge for yours, people could know it was available elsewhere for free but prefer to pay to have access to it through Whispernet.
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Let's say we have a well done HTML on PG. I run it through Calibre to generate a Mobipocket version and I want to copyright it. If I copyright it, can someone else do the same thing and get the same eBook and also copyright it or is it too late because I've done it first?