(I'll leave the whole message for context, but am only responding to a few points. People should read the howto at http://gutenberg.org/howto/scopy-howto , and the "about us" FAQ items at http://gutenberg.org/about for longer essays on some philosophy etc.) On Mon, Sep 12, 2005 at 12:18:37PM -0600, Lee Passey wrote:

Robert Shimmin <shimmin@uiuc.edu> wrote:

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Andrew Sly wrote:

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My recollection from the last time this was mentioned is that PG has had a few authors causually mention ideas like this over the years, but no one has actually gone ahead with it yet. I gather it would require some formal written statement, legally relinquishing copyright at a certain date, or under certain conditions (perhaps such as being out of print for a certain number of years.) I could understand most authors being reluctant to do that.

They don't have to do that. They merely have to license PG with perpetual, non-exclusive, world-wide rights to distribute the book on a royalty-free basis. See the FAQ, question V.71.

http://www.gutenberg.org/faq/V-71

-- RS

Following the recommendations made in the FAQ may satisfy Project Gutenberg's requirements, but in may not satisfy the author's. If you look at the language in the FAQ you will see that a this type of a license grants to Project Gutenberg the right to make and distribute copies of a book (presumably; the proposed language is a little unclear on this point). It does not grant to anyone who obtains a copy from Project Gutenberg the right to _re_-distribute the book.

Now, pretty much everyone understands that Project Gutenberg is not really an archive. The provenance of the e-texts it distributes is uncertain, editorial changes are undocumented, and as a result of the focus on over-simplified text "many things that should not have been forgotten have been lost." The true role of Project Gutenberg has rather been to reduce the barriers to access for a large number of classic texts. The notion that texts downloaded from Project Gutenberg cannot be shared seems to be antithetical to goal of making e-texts accessible.

On a somewhat unrelated note, I have heard anecdotes of people who have downloaded PG e-text and then actually gone out and _purchased_ commercial electronic versions of the same text in the hope (sometimes vain) that the commercial version would provide a better reading experience.

If I were an author hoping to preserve my work well into the future, I would be sure that 1. the grant of privilege would include rights of redistribution and 2. the work could not be modified in any way that would remove provenance, metadata, or semanticaly significant markup (such as logical emphasis). The Creative Commons non-commercial, no-derivative-works licence actual statisfies both of these goals well, and I note that Charles Stross, the author about whom this thread started, has actually released his latest novel in electronic form using just such a license (http://www.accelerando.org/book/).

You are taking a binary world, and trying to add gradiations. The *only* thing we track, and the *only* difference in our "small print" license is to say that an item is copyrighted. It's either copyrighted or public domain. The *** START OF and *** END OF tags are intended to clearly delineate the end of the PG header & license, and the start of the item which is "wrapped" in that license. It is perfectly acceptable, and often happens, that a copyrighted eBook will have its own license. We have stuff with permission statements (pre-dating CreativeCommons), with CC licenses, with GPL, and probably a few other things. These are perfectly compatible -- just think of "copyright" as a label, and our "license" as a wrapper. If an author provides Project Gutenberg with a copyrighted work, that work can include its own license.

The real question is how Project Gutenberg choses to deal with works which are not public domain and to which a specific license grant has not been made to Project Gutenberg, but which _are_ freely distributable via a Creative Commons license. As I read the CC license there is nothing there which would prevent PG from simply taking such works and adding them to its catalog (although it may be unlawful to add the inconsequential Project Gutenberg boilerplate).

This is true, if we desired such works, and they met our collection criteria (especially formatting). And, in fact, we often take such works. All it takes is a volunteer with the initiative to do the work.

On the other hand, there was some discussion here last month about whether or not PG would be willing to accept into its catalog scholarly annotations of existing classical text already part of its collection. The answer seemed to be that it would not, apparently based on the fear that Project Gutenberg might become a forum for any splinter group seeking to promote a special agenda (e.g., a commentary on _The Voyage of the Beagle_ by someone promoting "intelligent design" as a scientific theory). I believe there is some wisdom in this position. But it does raise the question about what to do when someone with an entirely new work wants to distribute it via Project Gutenberg. Perhaps the answer should be that Project Gutenberg will only accept new works which 1. have an existing publication history through a non-vanity press, and 2. can be freely distributed, and re-distributed, at least non-commercially, and that Project Gutenberg will only catalog and distribute such books at the request of someone _other than_ the author.

Addressed in scopy-howto. More: We're not a vanity press or a blog -- there are plenty already. Also, we're not a place for works in progress -- we just don't have staffing to apply editorial changes as a contemporary work evolves.

It may be that Project Gutenberg will want to limit itself to digitizing and popularizing only Public Domain texts that are no longer current, and leave to other organizations, such as the Internet Archive, the role of archiving current texts.

There's no "itself," there is just "we." For the most part, it has been very clear to me that the majority of volunteers are mainly (or only) interested in digitizing & preserving older public domain literature. Of the hundreds of copyrighted eBooks, I've done the posting work on nearly all of them since the year 2000. I, personally, would be very happy to see a spin-off PG project to address contemporary works better -- perhaps similarly to how the IA does it. In the meantime, you are right that the barriers to entry into the "main" PG collection are fairly high. As to how to make a spin-off, see the "about" FAQ items mentioned above. -- Greg