On Tue, January 24, 2012 3:20 pm, Karen Lofstrom wrote:
In addition, reworking the "copyright notice" so that it's a Creative Commons licence, which now has a track record and legal support.
The problem with this idea is that PG's "copyright notice" isn't. It's really a trademark claim. There is (probably) nothing in any PG text that is copyrightable other than the copyright notice itself. The PG notice says, in essence, "the name 'Project Gutenberg' is our trademark. It is intended to assure a certain level of quality (or lack thereof) in documents produced for Project Gutenberg. We can't keep you from modifying the text you get from us, but if you do you can't use our trademark on it because we can't ensure that it satisfies our requirements." This kind of trademark notice is qualitatively different from the copyright notices produced by Creative Commons. Clearly, the PG trademark notice needs to be simplified, probably moved to the end of the document, and in HTML versions included in a classified <div> (e.g. <div class="pgclaims">) so that it can easily be hidden by CSS. But it cannot be replaced by any kind of license from Creative Commons, which all rely on a valid copyright.