it might seem that way to you... but precedent sides against you. legally, a ruling has been issued; markup is sweat, not authorship...
OK, but can you provide a reference to that case for the rest of us who are curious?
as for d.r.m., amazon lets publishers decide on that matter for themselves.
but isn't that point moot if the e-books are constantly freely available from p.g.?
Most publishers, including presumably PG, are not around "forever." Part of the point of PG, in my understanding, is to make sure good books stay alive "forever", and to do so by making them widely distributed. DRM prevents them from being widely distributed, and also it effectively asserts a copyright on something for which no copyright exists. Copyright law says that one cannot break DRM on works under copyright. It doesn't say anything about what happens if someone breaks DRM on something which is not under copyright -- not that I want to be the one to test that case! PG hasn't always been "lily white" about this issue either IMHO, trying to "pick and choose" winners and losers among vendors and distribution formats. DRM also prevents readers from making the machine choices best for them, and it prevents them from moving their personal existing "risen-to-the-public-domain" library from one machine to another. For example, perhaps a reader switches from one cellphone provider to another, and now finds that the DRM placed on his personal existing "risen-to-the-public-domain" library prevents moving it to the cellphone provided by the new carrier. So, IMHO, DRM is being used for a lot more than preventing unwarranted copying. It is also being used to try to force consumers to stay with one vendor. Which seems like the whole theme of Apple, for one example. [Not to say that I know what stuff from Apple is or is not being distributed under DRM. To find out I'd have to buy an iPad and a third-party file manager, move a "risen" eBook off of the iPad, unzip it, and take a look-see to see if the unzipped contents is DRM encrypted or not. I assume one can look inside the zip -- its just trying to decrypt any internal encrypted content that would constitute cracking.] I think the fear that Michael has, which I would concur with, is that as long as "for pay" companies can make money off of risen-to-the-public-domain, and/or "orphaned works" intermediate in term between being actively published and "risen", such as Google has now "stolen away" [by exclusive agreement with the publishers] then the "for pay" companies will more and more push to extend "limited duration" copyright to mean "forever" -- which ultimately I believe bodes very ill for "free speech" and and free society and the long-term safety of our country -- which more and more will be ruled by a small number of extremely wealthy dynasty families who buy and sell our politicians secretly at will.