As a further point I would add that I believe PG texts which are a transcription of an old book should be just the text of that book, perhaps with the addition of explanatory or clarifying notes if needed. Adding our own policical or social messages is not appropriate in my opinion. (although I quite agree with Jeroen's sentiment.) It's also worth remembering that these texts are likely to be around for a long time. Some of the additional volunteer comments that apparantly seemed reasonable in early PG texts seem a little out of place today. (Such as itemizing details of what brand of scanner and what ocr software was used to digitize the text.) Andrew On Mon, 18 Jul 2005, Greg Newby wrote:
On Mon, Jul 18, 2005 at 10:22:39PM +0200, Jeroen Hellingman (Mailing List Account) wrote:
Can we use this fact to protest against this stupidity some how, for example, releasing it with a note, in both English and Spanish:
NOT FOR MEXICANS
THIS BOOK IS ILLEGAL TO DOWNLOAD IN MEXICO ONLY
Hi, Jeroen. Thanks for thinking to protect folks outside of the US, but this type of statement is something we don't need or want. As you see in our license & small print at http://gutenberg.org/license , we only ever talk about public domain status in the US.