Hi Greg. Please don't be afraid to ask questions... First, the usual disclaimer. I am not a lawer--Copyright laws are different in every country, and often in a state of flux --etc. Now here's my understanding of the topics you mention. First of all, published books often claim copyright on re-published material when it is really not merited. However, for our purposes at PG, we can't know for sure that editorial interventions such as you've mentioned have not happened--without doing a comparison with a proven public domain edition. And if you have that PD edition availible anyway, you may as well work from it. (On a side note, I'll mention that I have occasionally made some use of supposedly copyright imprints like this before. For example if I'm reformatting a German text to include in PG, and I get copyright clearnace from some late 19th century edition with a hard-to- read Fraktur font, then I may use a more recent edition as a reference, or to do some spot-checks.) Andrew On Wed, 24 Aug 2005, Greg Smith wrote:

I inherited from my grandfather 25 years ago 4 collections from his library. He was a Baptist minister (read poor).

The first collection is the 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Brittanica published 1910-1911. The other three collections are editions of works that were public domain at the time of the edition (eg `Best Known Works: Defoe'). The copyright dates range from the mid teens to the early forties.

But what are these copyrights copyrighting? I can understand editor comments, translations, pictures, etc. But what if spelling/grammar was modernized? Or, portions cut or moved? Would these books (~120 volumes) be of any use?

Apologies for my ignorance,

Greg Smith

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