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Originally Posted by Nate the great
No. If the work is in the public domain then it cannot be copyrighted. And the state of Oregon tried and failed to make a copyright claim based on formatting, so that's out too.
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That's great to know! (Do you happen to have a link, or know the name of the Oregon case? I'd love to throw that in my copyfight collection.)
I keep seeing public domain works with copyright warning notices on them, especially in ebooks. Fictionwise certainly doesn't say "you can freely share our public domain works." And when Wowio.com had free downloads of PDFs, I got a number of public domain works from them, and they're all tagged with a copyright notice.
Quote:
The Analysis of a Complete Act of Thought
John Dewey, 1859 – 1952
Copyright © 2008 by WOWIO LLC. All rights reserved.
No part of this ebook may be reproduced in any form without written
permission of the copyright owner.
The information in this book is furnished for informational use only, is
subject to change without notice, and should not be construed as a
commitment by WOWIO LLC. WOWIO LLC assumes no responsibility for
any errors or inaccuracies that may appear in this book.
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The ebook is an "edited" version, which means it's excerpted from the original (1910 book
How We Think), reformatted, has occasional bracketed phrases to cover for removed sections, and there's a paragraph of introduction at the beginning.
I have no idea what they think is covered by their copyright... the 40-word intro paragraph? The layout? The use of his sidenotes as paragraph titles? The one- to five-word bracketed phrases?