Automated dump of Gutenberg in torrent format, 11,000+ books in 7.4 Gb

[HarryT]

Acidzebra,

There are a fair number of copyrighted works in the PG archive which cannot be further distributed without explicit permission. Can you confirm that you have excluded all such books from your collection?

[acidzebra]

Harry, I left you a private message. In a nutshell, there are already 6+ distributed copies running out there so I couldn't kill this torrent even if I want to. I do not have the time to go over 11000+ books and individually check the terms for each ones. On a side note, I am a bit miffed at Gutenberg - it is completely unclear from their "freedom" page that such books exist in their collection.

I suggested you delete this thread I wouldn't want MobileRead to get into stormy waters over this.

[Nate the great]

There is no need to delete this thread. As per our policy, I removed the links.

[pagansoul]

I actually purchased 2 CDs of all the works in Project G about 7 years ago off ebay. I got tired of the 4 page intro real fast. I now prefer non-Gutenburg free releases better.

[Be Szpilman]

Originally Posted by pagansoul

I actually purchased 2 CDs of all the works in Project G about 7 years ago off ebay. I got tired of the 4 page intro real fast. I now prefer non-Gutenburg free releases better.

Yeah, the intro gets to me as well. I was actually kind of hoping this converter Acidzebra mentioned would do the handy work of at least throwing that into the end of the book, like some reformated PG jobs do.

[acidzebra]

Originally Posted by bzpilman

I was actually kind of hoping this converter Acidzebra mentioned would do the handy work of at least throwing that into the end of the book, like some reformated PG jobs do.

If you pull a HTML file from Gutenberg, it will just have a short Gutenberg preface and the whole disclaimer will be at the end. The text files usually have the whole thing up front.

[HarryT]

The "rules" with PG are that you must have "all or nothing". You can strip ALL the PG licence stuff, but if you do that, you're not allowed to call it a "Project Gutenberg" book. If you mention PG anywhere, you have to include the complete licence.

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by HarryT

The "rules" with PG are that you must have "all or nothing". You can strip ALL the PG licence stuff, but if you do that, you're not allowed to call it a "Project Gutenberg" book. If you mention PG anywhere, you have to include the complete licence.

I asked whether I could say that a given ebook had used the PG text as source (maybe corrected, formatted, etc.), and I was given this answer:

The two primary concerns in this case are:

1. Representing the changed work as an un-changed PG eBook.

2. Trading on the PG registered trademark (i.e., if someone is going to
be making money using it, they should share the wealth -- so to speak! <g>).

A note directing readers to the PG website where they can find the eBook
which you based your edition upon would be allowed. Just don't link or
point to the file itself, just to the website.

[JulietS]

The PG books that are under copyright all have a C after the PG number (xxxxxC). There aren't a lot of them.

More and more of the older books are being corrected, having a more recent and more compact header/footer added, and having an html version made. In general, however, given a choice of several versions of the same title, choose the one with the higher number. The numbers are assigned sequentially so the higher number books have been produced more recently than the lower number ones. They are more likely to have an html version and are more likely to be illustrated.

JulietS

[acidzebra]

Originally Posted by JulietS

The PG books that are under copyright all have a C after the PG number (xxxxxC). There aren't a lot of them.JulietS

Can someone confirm this? Because if that is the case, my torrent is perfectly legal - my script merely grabbed anything with numerical characters.

I'd like the link reinstated if this is true.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by acidzebra

Can someone confirm this? Because if that is the case, my torrent is perfectly legal - my script merely grabbed anything with numerical characters.

I'd like the link reinstated if this is true.

Did your script fix -- to be — (proper em dash)? Did it fix the _text_ to be text (proper italic instead of underscore? Did it make a proper ToC? I'm curious what sorts of things your script has done in the formatting process.

[acidzebra]

My script was merely a mass-download wrapper for FangornUK's script here:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=8532
So if you were happy with those results, you'll be happy with this one, and vice versa.

[silencer]

A god, and not a man.

[Patricia]

Originally Posted by acidzebra

Can someone confirm this? Because if that is the case, my torrent is perfectly legal - my script merely grabbed anything with numerical characters.

I'd like the link reinstated if this is true.

You can reinstate he link yourself by editing your first post. (If you add it this late in the thread then it may be overlooked.)
Just open the post and click on the edit button.

[JulietS]

Originally Posted by acidzebra

Because if that is the case, my torrent is perfectly legal - my script merely grabbed anything with numerical characters.

It's perfectly legal for folks in the US. The main PG archive follows US copyright law, which is quite different from most other countries. As a rule of thumb, anything published anywhere in the world before 1923 is public domain in the US. Most other countries determine public domain by when the author died, with copyrights expiring 50-70 years after the author dies. So some books that are in the public domain in the US will not be in most of the rest of the world, and vice versa.

Project Gutenberg Australia, PG Canada, and PG Europe are all located in life+50 countries so they can contain material that is not legal for the original PG.

Some countries will allow download of a single copy for personal use only of some kinds of electronic material. Others are very strict about not doing that. Trying to keep track of all the variation in copyright laws across countries, and all the variations in "fair use" etc, is a monumental task that PG cannot begin to accomplish authoritatively. That's why there's a statement associated with each public-domain-in-the-US book advising all users to be sure that downloading it is legal under the laws of their country.

IANAL, but it's safe to say that the legality of your download varies by the country the downloader is in. PG does make some of its CD images available via bit torrent. I think, although I'm not sure, that they put some sort of disclaimer in it about carefully considering the copyright laws of the country that you are in. You might check to see how they handle it.

JulietS
Distributed Proofreaders