I would say the answer to your first question is no. See Faq C4, Why does Project Gutenberg advise only on U.S. copyright issues? http://www.gutenberg.org/faq/C-4 I have found that copyright is a set of issues that continually gets more complex the closer you look into it. Copyright is not actually one "right", but a bundle of separate rights. Every country has its own laws which often differ in the small details, and laws can be updated, modified, etc. at any time. It could be a liability for PG to make claims about the copyright status of items in different countries, if the information that claim was based on turns out to be wrong, or outdated. If it helps to realise it, I suspect that one thing that led to the recent change of wording that you noticed was a challenge that I received through the catalog error email. (Which I forwarded on to others.) The gist of the message was "This text is under copyright in my country, you should remove it now or you will risk legal action." Andrew On Tue, 27 Dec 2005, Darren Burnhill wrote:
Hi,
Does PG have any future plans to ascertain the status of books for countries other than the U.S.?
Whilst I think that clarifying the status on the download page is good;
Not copyrighted in the United States. If you live elsewhere check the laws of your country before downloading this ebook.
A link to some relevant information would be better.
BTW: The submit the item link on the copyright-howto page needs updating;
http://beryl.ils.unc.edu/copy.html
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