Mobileread Library - > change in copyright

[SBT]

Originally Posted by DaleDe

Perhaps we can send our files to the newly started DPLA. I think we should share our resources with them. See the news front page for info on the DPLA or look in our wiki.

Dale

it would be excellent if this was possible, but I thought DPLA was meant to be a meta-site, linking to actual digital book-collections?

[montsnmags]

Originally Posted by SBT

I'm also rather depressed by the thought of fine books in the P. Clark Library becoming unavailable for everyone – would it be possible to pass them along to someone 100% Canadian? Project Gutenberg Canada, for example? Or someone from Oz?

Australia is not a life+50 country, as of a few years ago (2006). We are now life+70. While the change to term wasn't retroactive, there'd still be books removed from the Library.

Cheers,
Marc

[hidari]

I find this whole thread sad......I say life plus 333 years... then we will guarantee the end of on line ebook piracy

[vivaldirules]

Originally Posted by SBT

I'm also rather depressed by the thought of fine books in the P. Clark Library becoming unavailable for everyone – would it be possible to pass them along to someone 100% Canadian? Project Gutenberg Canada, for example? Or someone from Oz?

I like this idea a lot. And whether or not Alex is in a position to get the affected books into the hands of a Canadian organization (his hands may be tied in some manner) there's nothing that would prevent one or more of us from doing it. I, for one, would find it a terrible waste of people's efforts to see the books simply become unavailable except as they may appear already on pirate sites (which is a disgusting thought, I may add). So I would certainly be willing to help except that as a U.S. citizen, I'm not willing to perform the actual downloads and transfers. I would, however, be willing to contact suitable recipients (starting with PG Canada) and also help identifying which titles in the library are at risk. Is anyone else here supportive of that notion?

[Ladyrixx]

Originally Posted by pynch

Let’s say that a new Shakespeare play is discovered and published today. Your “strictly life+70” rule would make it ok to upload it here instantly, while Canadian copyright law requires to wait for 50 years. I assume you don’t want us to ignore those laws.

I've been trying to figure that out too. When I was in college they found a new Jules Verne book. Theoretically, it should have been in the public domain as soon as they found it.

[vivaldirules]

From the list of 26,403 books available this morning, I've created a list of authors and will work through them one by one to identify authors who died 50 to 70 years ago and make a list of the books in the library that are at risk. One problem is that I'm going to miss translations this way (e.g., if a work has been translated into English then I assume that the relevant "author" may be translator and not the work's original author). Is that correct?

Originally Posted by vivaldirules

From the list of 26,403 books available this morning, I've created a list of authors and will work through them one by one to identify authors who died 50 to 70 years ago and make a list of the books in the library that are at risk. One problem is that I'm going to miss translations this way (e.g., if a work has been translated into English then I assume that the relevant "author" may be translator and not the work's original author). Is that correct?

Yes, you are correct. The translation has its own copyright. Thanks for your effort on this.

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by Hamlet53

Yes, you are correct. The translation has its own copyright. Thanks for your effort on this.

Each translation does have its own copyright but it is unlikely that the authors name listed in the eBook upload forum is the translator. It is more likely it is the original author. Take for example Jules Verne who wrote in French.

Dale

[vivaldirules]

Well, I'm going to have to give up before I've really started. I spent three hours and am not through the "A" authors. I was using Wikipedia and Google to determine the authors with death dates after 1942 and copying all the listed books in the library by those authors into an At Risk list. I was copying the ones by authors I couldn't find information on to an Unknown list. But this is incredibly tedious. There are a lot of translations and I usually can't find the death dates of the translator. There are illustrated books and have to find the illustrator's death dat, too. There are books by multiple authors and books by Various Authors. Books in languages I can't easily find transliterations for. And there are plenty of books by authors who died well after 1942 or are still living but have possibly allowed publication through Creative Commons or some other means. I could easily spend weeks at this and come up with a list that misses many and probably also has titles that shouldn't be in the list. Sorry, but I can't commit the time that's required to do this. Or at least not alone. If Alexander is doing this, I hope he's getting some help or has better tools available.

[SBT]

Originally Posted by vivaldirules

Well, I'm going to have to give up before I've really started. I spent three hours and am not through the "A" authors.
...

Yip, it did sound like a pretty overwhelming task...
Getting the Patricia Clark library 100% life+70 compliant sounds like an impossible dream. However, as long as Alex can show that a reasonable, good-faith effort has been made to purge non-compliant books, and that valid requests to remove non-compliant books are promptly fulfilled, I believe the legalities should be O.K. The tricky bit is, of course, what constitutes "reasonable effort", but removing all authors who died <70 years ago is a very good start, and (IMHO,IANAL,etc) probably sufficient.

I did make a start on a relational database for the library a couple of months ago. It is not complete – to make the task manageable a limited myself to epub and mobi books – but at least there is a pretty comprehensive list of authors therein, with some of the duplicates removed. A fun task would be to make an automated wikipedia query for each authors lifespan...

Edit: a better method: Edit: Something like this, for example, for UN*X/cygwin:

#!/bin/bash
a=${1// /%20}
echo -n $1": "
echo -e $(curl -s "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?format=json&action=query&titles=$a&prop=revisions&rvprop=content") | grep -o "\(may refer to:\|^| *DATE OF DEATH *=.*\|^| *name *=.*\|^|.*=.*[Dd]eath date.*\|\"missing\":\"\"\\|\"pageid\": *[0-9]\+\)" |sed 's/.*": * //'|xargs

Save in a file, e.g. when_croaked, make executable, and type for example

./when_croaked "Conan Doyle"

Rather messy output, but at least it gives an indication if a page actually exists, e.g. a disambiguation page, if it doesn't actually give the death date.
Of course, this is by no means a fool-proof method, but if the answer to a query is after 1942, the author in question should be looked at more closely.

[SBT]

Well, ran the author list from my aforementioned database through the aforeshown script, and here's the list of names of people who died after 1941:

year	author
----	------
1943	A. Merritt
1943	Andreas Latzko
1943	Beatrix Potter
1943	Elinor Glyn
1943	E. M. Delafield
1943	Jackson Gregory
1943	Perley Poore Sheehan
1943	Radclyffe Hall
1943	R. Austin Freeman
1943	Robert Eustace
1943	Stephen Vincent Benét
1944	Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
1944	C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
1944	Ethel Lina White
1944	Harold Bell Wright
1944	Hulbert Footner
1944	Irvin S. Cobb
1944	Margery Williams
1944	Max Brand
1944	Stephen Leacock
1944	William Allen White
1944	William Ellery Leonard
1945	Achmed Abdullah
1945	Arthur Morrison
1945	Ellen Glasgow
1945	Ferdynand Antoni Ossendowski
1945	Johan Huizinga
1945	Margaret Deland
1945	Maurice Baring
1945	Max Ehrmann
1945	Robert Benchley
1945	Theodore Dreiser
1945	Van Tassel Sutphen
1946	Booth Tarkington
1946	Damon Runyon
1946	E. Phillips Oppenheim
1946	Ernest Ingersoll
1946	Henry Handel Richardson
1946	H. G. Wells
1946	John Maynard Keynes
1946	Otis Adelbert Kline
1946	Stewart Edward White
1947	Angela Brazil
1947	Arthur Machen
1947	Charles Nordhoff
1947	Flora Thompson
1947	Grace Livingston Hill
1947	Henry Ford
1947	Hugh Lofting
1947	J. D. Beresford
1947	Lennie Lower
1947	Lloyd Osbourne
1947	Meredith Nicholson
1947	M. P. Shiel
1947	Nicholas Roerich
1947	Willa Cather
1948	A. E. W. Mason
1948	Gertrude Atherton
1948	Malcolm Campbell
1948	Susan Glaspell
1948	Zelda Fitzgerald
1949	Arthur Leo Zagat
1949	Arthur Scott Bailey
1949	Axel Munthe
1949	Franz von Rintelen
1949	H. Bedford-Jones
1949	Hervey Allen
1949	Maurice Maeterlinck
1949	Norbert Davis
1949	Will Cuppy
1950	Aylmer Haldane
1950	Edgar Lee Masters
1950	Edgar Rice Burroughs
1950	Edna St. Vincent Millay
1950	Erle Cox
1950	Ernest Poole
1950	George A. Birmingham
1950	George Bernard Shaw
1950	George Orwell
1950	Irving Bacheller
1950	Max Pemberton
1950	Rafael Sabatini
1950	Robert Smythe Hichens
1950	Warwick Deeping
1951	Algernon Blackwood
1951	Arthur Gask
1951	Eleanor Gates
1951	F. G. Loring
1951	Gelett Burgess
1951	Henry De Vere Stacpoole
1951	Lloyd C. Douglas
1951	Ludwig Wittgenstein
1951	Sinclair Lewis
1952	Benedetto Croce
1952	Jeffery Farnol
1952	Josephine Tey
1952	Knut Hamsun
1952	Marjorie Bowen
1952	Norman Douglas
1952	Waldemar Bonsels
1952	William J. Long
1953	Dylan Thomas
1953	Hilaire Belloc
1953	Louis Ginzberg
1953	Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
1953	Maurice Nicoll
1953	Temple Bailey
1954	Bess Streeter Aldrich
1954	Charles Yale Harrison
1954	Colette
1954	James Hilton
1954	Joseph Hergesheimer
1954	Robert Ames Bennet
1954	Sydney Horler
1954	William MacLeod Raine
1955	James Agee
1955	Lewis Spence
1955	Thomas Mann
1955	Una Lucy Silberrad
1956	A. A. Milne
1956	Clarence E. Mulford
1956	E. R. Punshon
1956	H. L. Mencken
1956	Max Beerbohm
1956	Michael Arlen
1956	Patrick Braybrooke
1956	Walter de la Mare
1957	Christopher Morley
1957	Dorothy L. Sayers
1957	Freeman Wills Crofts
1957	Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
1957	Harold Speed
1957	Laura Ingalls Wilder
1957	Malcolm Lowry
1957	Nikos Kazantzakis
1957	Peter B. Kyne
1957	Peter Freuchen
1957	Ray Cummings
1957	Wilhelm Reich
1957	Wyndham Lewis
1958	Betty MacDonald
1958	Carroll John Daly
1958	Dorothy Canfield Fisher
1958	Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
1958	Henry Kuttner
1958	James Branch Cabell
1958	Johnston McCulley
1958	Mary Roberts Rinehart
1958	Robert W. Service
1958	Rose Macaulay
1958	Samuel Hopkins Adams
1959	Apsley Cherry-Garrard
1959	Arthur O. Friel
1959	Frank W. Boreham
1959	Grace S. Richmond
1959	Jim Kjelgaard
1959	Laurence Housman
1959	Octavus Roy Cohen
1959	Raymond Chandler
1959	Sax Rohmer
1960	Dornford Yates
1960	Eden Phillpotts
1960	Elizabeth Andrews
1960	Emily Post
1960	James Montgomery Flagg
1960	John P. Marquand
1960	Nevil Shute
1961	Carolyn Sherwin Bailey
1961	Clark Ashton Smith
1961	Dashiell Hammett
1961	Ernest Hemingway
1961	Isabel Paterson
1961	Josephine Daskam Bacon
1961	Oliver Onions
1961	Patricia Wentworth
1962	Caroline Lockhart
1962	Edmond Privat
1962	George Sylvester Viereck
1962	Hermann Hesse
1962	Vilhjalmur Stefansson
1962	William Alexander Fraser
1963	C. S. Lewis
1963	Mark Clifton
1963	Patrick MacGill
1963	W. E. B. Du Bois
1964	Clarence Budington Kelland
1964	H. Beam Piper
1964	Herbert Hoover
1965	E. E. Smith
1965	Elliott O'Donnell
1965	Helen Waddell
1965	T. S. Eliot
1965	Winston Churchill
1965	W. Somerset Maugham
1966	Arthur Waley
1966	Kathleen Norris
1967	Arthur Ransome
1967	David Goodis
1967	Julio Baghy
1967	Lawrence Beesley
1967	Siegfried Sassoon
1968	Ed Lacy
1968	Edna Ferber
1968	Fannie Hurst
1968	Helen Keller
1968	Robert Leslie Bellem
1968	Sara Ware Bassett
1968	Upton Sinclair
1969	Marcel Allain
1969	Richmal Crompton
1969	Seabury Quinn
1970	Bertrand Russell
1970	E. M. Forster
1970	Gypsy Rose Lee
1970	Napoleon Hill
1971	John W. Campbell
1971	Lewis Patrick Greene
1971	Norman Bentwich
1972	Daisy Ashford
1972	Ezra Pound
1972	Fredric Brown
1972	John Berryman
1973	Mary Ellen Chase
1973	Mordaunt Hall
1974	Arthur J. Burks
1974	Georgette Heyer
1974	Olive Higgins Prouty
1974	Vincent Starrett
1975	Maisie Ward
1975	Murray Leinster
1975	Rex Stout
1976	Agatha Christie
1976	Edward Streeter
1976	Stith Thompson
1977	Edmond Hamilton
1977	Everett B. Cole
1977	Stephen W. Meader
1978	Lon Williams
1980	Jean-Paul Sartre
1980	Tom Godwin
1981	David Garnett
1981	Nisargadatta Maharaj
1982	Philip K. Dick
1983	Jonathan Latimer
1983	Mack Reynolds
1983	Scott Nearing
1985	S. Omar Barker
1986	Allan R. Bosworth
1986	Charles Starrett
1986	Frank Herbert
1986	Gerhard Rohlfs
1986	Helen Wells
1987	Randall Garrett
1987	Terry Carr
1988	Clifford D. Simak
1988	Donald Keyhoe
1990	Ben Frank
1992	Alan E. Nourse
1992	Fritz Leiber
1993	Keith Laumer
1993	Lester del Rey
1994	Frank Belknap Long
1994	Guy Debord
1994	Raymond F. Jones
1994	Raymond Z. Gallun
1994	Richard Nixon
1994	Robert Shea
1996	H. L. Gold
1997	Marc Segar
1999	Howard Browne
1999	Marion Zimmer Bradley
2001	Poul Anderson
2002	Henry Slesar
2002	Jerry Sohl
2002	Mildred Benson
2002	Richard Mitchell
2004	Denis Richards
2004	Roger Dee
2004	Ronald Reagan
2005	Andre Norton
2005	Martin Blumenson
2005	Robert Sheckley
2006	Gerald Ford
2007	Charles L. Fontenay
2007	Kurt Vonnegut
2008	Algis Budrys
2008	Donald E. Westlake
2010	Robert Byrd

All in all 288 authors popped up through this quick & dirty search.
The result should be taken with a tablespoon of salt – many names have been missed which are in wikipedia, wrong person with same name may have been queried, and there are errors in wikipedia (Year of death for Percy Bysse Shelley was given as 2010). Still, it's a start to a dreary and depressing task...

[Wetdogeared]

Must the ebooks be physically removed from the server(s) or just the download links?

It would be nice if the ebooks remained in place and the download links deactivated then reactivated when the work comes out of copyright.

Whatever the case, it would be preferable, to me, that all the hard work in creating the introductory blurbs remain intact.

[pynch]

Originally Posted by Wetdogeared

Must the ebooks be physically removed from the server(s) or just the download links?

It would be nice if the ebooks remained in place and the download links deactivated then reactivated when the work comes out of copyright.

Whatever the case, it would be preferable, to me, that all the hard work in creating the introductory blurbs remain intact.

As Jellby said before (see below), they will only be deactivated. I assume that the same will happen to the introductions and the threads.

Originally Posted by Jellby

Of course, they will not be completely removed, only they will not be accessible... they'll be back online when they're copyright-free in life+70 countries (which means less than 20 years)

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Legal hassles. Can't really say any more than that, I'm afraid.

Exactly the issue I've brought up many times in the past I presume. Sorry but I'm actually glad to see it come to a head.