--- Rod Butcher <rbutcher@hyenainternet.com> wrote:
Can I get some clarification : I have read the copyright FAQ. Most of the books we deal with here in Australia were printed in the UK. Do the rules apply everywhere, in the country where I am or the country where the book was published ? Jonathan Ingram's post seems to indicate the latter i.e. all books he considers for scanning where he is (UK) must be elligible under UK law, irrespective of where they were published. Hence they have to have been published (effectively printed) more than 70 years ago, no matter where they were published. Correct ?
It's a slightly gray area. I will sometimes scan material for the US DP site which may not yet be out of copyright in the UK -- and it can be very difficult at times to decide whether or not something is out of copyright in a life+X country, particularly when the author is obscure or anonymous, and/or the texts are undated. I'm generally happier, though, scanning material which is definitely out of copyright in both the UK and the US when I'm uploading the page scans to DP. Copyright is a very thorny subject, and it only gets more evil when you mix different copyright systems. The easiest thing to do is to ignore it altogether, but that only works up until the lawyers start sending letters out (as various file sharing systems have discovered :) ). The next simplest thing, as far as content provision is concerned, is to only consider the copyright laws in the country of the server (pre-1923 for DPUS, life+50 for DPEurope). Many publishers slap a copyright symbol on anything they publish, regardless of the validity of the claim. I've seen copyright incorrectly claimed for facsimile reprints of 300 year old texts before. Similarly, if you are reprinting a book containing public domain material which was first published more than 25 years ago, you have no copyright claim over the typography in the UK -- it's only new layouts that get a new copyright. -- Jon Ingram __________________________________ Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005 http://mail.yahoo.com