Hi Tony. I believe that the matter under discussion was not a matter of the rights surrounding the source texts used to produce PG materials, but rather rights of the PG texts themselves. The argument (if I understood correctly) was that in some juristictions legal usage of PG texts might be restricted because the "typesetting" done in preparing the PG texts would qualify for certain protections on its own. This whole discussion reminds me of a few points I like to make when people start making overly broad, generalized statements about copyright laws: 1) Copyright is not just one right, but a bundle of rights. 2) It is treated on a national basis--that is every country has its own copyright laws and quirks about how those laws are applied. (and to what types of material, and what aspects of a given work, and with what definition of certain terms, etc., etc.) 3) The state of likely copyright status for an item in a given country at a given time can be affected by laws that were passed many previously; various amendments that have taken place over time, under pressure from various sources; international conventions the country may be a member of; precedence set by certain legal decisions, etc. Andrew On Mon, 6 Mar 2006, Tony Baechler wrote:
Hi. sorry to nitpick here, and I admit this is out of my league, but wouldn't a plain text edition remove any and all fonts or typography anyway? Let's say that you harvest an html or pdf from a country where typography is still under copyright. It is converted to plain text to comply with PG standards, plus valid html etc. Now it gets imported back into the original country. Wouldn't it be legal because the fonts have been removed? Am I missing something obvious? I've followed the thread and understand it relates to google's idea of public domain, but it would seem to me that the copyrighted portion was removed (the typography) so it wouldn't matter.