Cross-posting from the PGPD discussion list, with modifications. Normally, I am opposed using Project Gutenberg as a tool for activism, but in the case of the Trans Pacific Partnership, we are dealing with an existential threat to PG, and we need to make as many people aware of this as quickly as possible. For this reason, I propose to put ugly, not-to-be-ignored banners on our site and in all our books, warning about this, and only remove them when TPP is shelved. This way, this disgusting treaty and its nasty consequences will quickly reach a public of millions. To see a sample of what I am proposing, a rework of one book that will be affected by this, I posted to PG about 14 years ago: http://gutenberg.ph/previews/bingham/IncaLand.html, basically adding the following text to the header: ===================================================================== WARNING THIS BOOK MIGHT DISAPPEAR FROM PROJECT GUTENBERG This book, which has been in the Public Domain since 1997 due to copyright term expiration, is due to be retroactively placed back under copyright restrictions until 2027 if the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) Agreement is turned into law in the US. This treaty is highly problematic in many ways, but is a severe threat Project Gutenberg’s collection of free eBooks, as it might force us to remove this and many other books from our collection, which means many thousands of man-hours work being put to waste, and our mission irreparably harmed and set back for decades. However, it is not yet too late to avert this disaster. Please tell Congress to vote no on the TPP, and help the EFF in its fight against this toxic deal. Please forgive us the use of this ugly banner. It will disappear once this threat is averted, or will go down with this book. ===================================================================== A more generic banner could be added to books not affected by TPP. I believe the retroactive extension of copyright is unconstitutional in the US and, since treaties cannot trump the constitution this will be challenged in the Supreme Court; experience with challenges against the CTEA in 1995 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eldred_v._Ashcroft) has shown that it is very hard to explain that even in that forum. (Note that at that time, there was no claw-back of already expired copyrights, as will likely be the case with TPP). P.S. I will from now on concentrate on books threatened by the TPP, to get as many books through this the DP system as possible before this threat might materialize. I will also encourage everybody to keep copies of PG's collection locally. It is easy to use rsync to download all books. A collection of all .zip files on PG servers is about 100GB, and about 5GB can be gained by re-compressing them with 7z)