On 3/3/2012 11:56 AM, James Adcock wrote:
Copyright is a governmentally created monopoly that protects a specific creative expression of an idea. The full Project Gutenberg license is no doubt protected by copyright.
My understanding [I am not a lawyer, consult your lawyer] is that legalize is not subject to copyright. IE anyone can use legalize.
Your understanding is incorrect, particularly in light of the Berne Convention Implementation act. Generally (but not always) documents produced by or on behalf of a governmental entity are free from copyright (or perhaps are simply dumped into the "fair use" category -- I'm not quite sure how Berne affects government documents). The U.S. Code can be used without permission, as can any court decision. But an attorney's work product? If it has the "modicum of creativity" required by Feist v. Rural Telephone I would say it is clearly 1. copyrightable, and 2. copyrighted. Attorneys go to rather great lengths to protect their "form files," as they recognize great value in them. There are a number of legal publishers out there who produce books of forms; I doubt any one of them would take kindly to you republishing them. Like all copyrighted material, boilerplate is subject to the usual copyright limitations such as fair use, bare recitation of fact and independent creation. And I doubt that any lawyer is going to go to the extreme of suing you over coping boilerplate. If you do it, just be aware that you /could/ be sued, even if you probably won't.
I read the PG legalize as saying that efforts required to file format translate from one file format to another can still retain the PG license terms.
You may be correct; I haven't bothered to carefully parse the PG legalize because I find it easier to simply remove it. If you choose to continue the PG license into your new work I'm sure Project Gutenberg won't mind. [snip]
Also, please do not follow a common practice on mobiread of scarfing a cover page from a contemporary printing of the work! Such cover art I could think might be under current copyright.
Almost certainly. I think the Internet Archive's "Open Library" project (which is, in fact, not a library) is particularly guilty on this score, and has opened itself up to a huge potential liability.