In a message dated 10/18/2004 4:19:45 PM Mountain Standard Time, Bowerbird@aol.com writes:
i don't know anything about that.
i'm very supportive of people who will have the guts to publish something and take a chance at being dragged into court, if they are making that thing _available_ when it was an orphan out of circulation.
but again, i don't know about blackmask, so i don't know if that applies, or not...
I agree. Two of the series involved were Doc Savage and The Shadow. Other people had posted all of these, and David got them from their sites and reposted them at Blackmask (I think he did make other arrangements for the last Doc Savage books, which had not been posted when the decision was handed down.). At this point, it was a public service, and I appreciated it very much. However, several months ago courts ruled that Conde Nast owned both series. Whether Conde Nast DESERVES to own the copyrights, having acquired them by buying a company that had bought another company and so on for several steps, is now a moot point. Conde OWNS them. I know for a fact, having been in touch with Conde Nast, that Conde Nast intends to rerelease them, and expects to finalize agreements on how to do that by the end of the year. When the court case wound up, the people doing the original posting immediately pulled their sites down. David continued to keep them on his. It is arguably still a public service, because the titles still aren't available commercially. But legally, he is bucking copyright. SO FAR Conde Nast has not gone after anybody, and is being as considerate as legally possible with those who kept the books alive. But sooner or later, if David doesn't remove them from his site, Conde Nast WILL go after him. I am trying to convince Conde Nast that, as they wait for whatever it takes to get them all in print, that they allow downloads from Blackmask and from FictionWise, my favorite commercial e- book publisher, for the nominal sum of a dollar apiece, and that they take down the dollar version when the new version is ready on each book. I don't know yet what they're going to wind up doing. However, because of my personal knowledge of this particular situation, I would really hesitate to post any of Blackmask's titles without finding out for myself what the copyright status is. Project Gutenberg MUST comply with the law, no matter what other people do or don't do. As a writer, I agree a hundred and ten percent that books should be kept alive, legally if possible, by piracy otherwise. I don't WANT my books to die when I do. All the same, once a copyright has been established and firmly assigned to person or corporation A, it becomes illegal for person or corporation B to continue to traffic in that book, even if the trafficking is free. Anne