AFAIK the copyright notice is valid, but only applies to the page and line layout plus cover layout of the new paper edition, not the PG text. Not that they would tell you that.
Not in our opinion (which has been vetted by several expert copyright lawyers):
No Sweat of the Brow Copyright http://www.gutenberg.org/howto/sweat-no-c
Not sure about in the US, but the case law, at least when I researched it about 7 or 8 years ago, was still unsettled in Canada and other commonwealth countries. I don't know off hand that that situation has changed. In the UK, most if not all EU countries, and much of the Commonwealth - - though not in Canada -- there is also an express provision protecting "editions" or "typographical arrangements". The term is generally shorter than full copyright, and of course they aren't exclusive. You can prepare another edition or typographical arrangement of Shakespeare in the UK, you just can't republish an exact copy of someone else's in the first 25 years after publication. Quaere; does "edition" or "typographical arrangement" copyright subsist in PG e-texts, in countries which recognize those types of copyright?
On Wed, Mar 01, 2006 at 03:36:38PM -0500, Wallace J.McLean wrote:
AFAIK the copyright notice is valid, but only applies to the page and line layout plus cover layout of the new paper edition, not the PG text. Not that they would tell you that.
Not in our opinion (which has been vetted by several expert copyright lawyers):
No Sweat of the Brow Copyright http://www.gutenberg.org/howto/sweat-no-c
Not sure about in the US, but the case law, at least when I researched it about 7 or 8 years ago, was still unsettled in Canada and other commonwealth countries. I don't know off hand that that situation has changed.
PG's volunteer lawyers are not aware of any case law for this specific question, either. The sweat-no-c document is based on their research on the US Title 17, and surrounding/related case law like Feist v. Rural Telephone Co. BTW, there is at least one grey area: when display involves code (say, some Javascript or even CSS, or something more complex like a complete viewer). In that type of situation, the code itself will likely be copyrighted, even if the content it displays is not. The challenge is when the copyrighted code is embedded / intermixed with the public domain content -- like with CSS or Javascript & HTML. PG tends to avoid this by doing our own markup, & asserting it's public domain, but this grey area might limit some of our harvesting activities.
In the UK, most if not all EU countries, and much of the Commonwealth - - though not in Canada -- there is also an express provision protecting "editions" or "typographical arrangements". The term is generally shorter than full copyright, and of course they aren't exclusive. You can prepare another edition or typographical arrangement of Shakespeare in the UK, you just can't republish an exact copy of someone else's in the first 25 years after publication.
Quaere; does "edition" or "typographical arrangement" copyright subsist in PG e-texts, in countries which recognize those types of copyright?
Short answer: we only try to follow US laws, and I'm unaware of anything like this provision in the US. The closest is copyrights on specific fonts, which doesn't really matter much for PG since we seldom include scans of the raw pages from a print book with our eBooks, and our sources tend to be pretty old anyway. It might be this type of copyright (or whatever it might be called) would play a role in the EU and elsewhere...though in practice, if a physical book is old enough to be public domain based on author's death date, probably any typography copyright has also expired.
participants (2)
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Greg Newby -
Wallace J.McLean