Thanks for that post, Lee. Very helpful :)
Alex
On 3/2/2012 3:58 PM, Robert Gibbins wrote:
[snip]
However strictly speaking these are no longer quite the PG originals, so my
question is can I do this, or does the PG license prohibit it? Putting the
question a different way, how much of the Gutenberg wrappings do I have to
delete to be 'legal'?
Caveat: response based on U.S. law; it may or may not be correct in your jurisdiction.
In dealing with the Project Gutenberg "license," there are two related but independent issues that must be dealt with: copyright, and trademark.
Copyright is a governmentally created monopoly that protects a specific creative expression of an idea. The full Project Gutenberg license is no doubt protected by copyright.
Trademark is a commercial protection, designed to fulfill the public policy objective of consumer protection, by preventing the public from being misled as to the origin or quality of a product or service. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation claims a trademark in the term "Project Gutenberg" as it applies to electronic texts. (The Wikipedia article on Trademark is quite good if you're interested in the nitty-gritty of Trademark law).
Neither protection applies to assertions of facts. So, if you say "This edition was derived from the Project Gutenberg edition downloaded March 3, 2012," you have violated neither protection.
When it comes to Trademark, what you don't want to do is anything that might create "confusion in the marketplace." So you can say anything you want that 1. is factually correct, or 2. does not imply that your product was produced by Project Gutenberg.
If I were doing it, I would first remove the entire Project Gutenberg license, and any text referring to it. I would then remove any text that indicates the origin of this particular edition as being produced under the auspices of Project Gutenberg. Any remaining text in the "Gutenblurbs" can then be paraphrased, and any other factual statements can be added.
I just happen to have "A Tale of Two Cities" open in another window. By my guidelines the opening "gutenblurb" would be reduced to:
<blockquote>
Title: A Tale of Two Cities
A Story of the French Revolution
Author: Charles Dickens
Language: English
Character set encoding: UTF-8
</blockquote>
The closing "gutenblurb" would be deleted in its entirety.
I might then add:
<blockquote>
This edition was derived from the Project Gutenberg edition [EBook #98] last edited January 23, 2011. That edition was apparently produced by Judith Boss, David Widger, and other anonymous volunteers.
This edition was edited by Lee Passey. The formatting has been changed to comply with the requirements of the XHTML specification, and to replace stylistic markup with semantic markup. Styling has been removed which had caused it not to fit your screen, and a reference to a user-selected style sheet was added.
</blockquote>
HTH.
Cheers,
Lee
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