Thanks for that post, Lee. Very helpful :) Alex On Mar 3, 2012 1:25 PM, "Lee Passey" <lee@novomail.net> wrote:

On 3/2/2012 3:58 PM, Robert Gibbins wrote:

[snip]

However strictly speaking these are no longer quite the PG originals, so

...

my question is can I do this, or does the PG license prohibit it? Putting the question a different way, how much of the Gutenberg wrappings do I have to delete to be 'legal'?

Caveat: response based on U.S. law; it may or may not be correct in your jurisdiction.

In dealing with the Project Gutenberg "license," there are two related but independent issues that must be dealt with: copyright, and trademark.

Copyright is a governmentally created monopoly that protects a specific creative expression of an idea. The full Project Gutenberg license is no doubt protected by copyright.

Trademark is a commercial protection, designed to fulfill the public policy objective of consumer protection, by preventing the public from being misled as to the origin or quality of a product or service. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation claims a trademark in the term "Project Gutenberg" as it applies to electronic texts. (The Wikipedia article on Trademark is quite good if you're interested in the nitty-gritty of Trademark law).

Neither protection applies to assertions of facts. So, if you say "This edition was derived from the Project Gutenberg edition downloaded March 3, 2012," you have violated neither protection.

When it comes to Trademark, what you don't want to do is anything that might create "confusion in the marketplace." So you can say anything you want that 1. is factually correct, or 2. does not imply that your product was produced by Project Gutenberg.

If I were doing it, I would first remove the entire Project Gutenberg license, and any text referring to it. I would then remove any text that indicates the origin of this particular edition as being produced under the auspices of Project Gutenberg. Any remaining text in the "Gutenblurbs" can then be paraphrased, and any other factual statements can be added.

I just happen to have "A Tale of Two Cities" open in another window. By my guidelines the opening "gutenblurb" would be reduced to:

<blockquote> Title: A Tale of Two Cities A Story of the French Revolution

Author: Charles Dickens

Language: English

Character set encoding: UTF-8 </blockquote>

The closing "gutenblurb" would be deleted in its entirety.

I might then add:

<blockquote> This edition was derived from the Project Gutenberg edition [EBook #98] last edited January 23, 2011. That edition was apparently produced by Judith Boss, David Widger, and other anonymous volunteers.

This edition was edited by Lee Passey. The formatting has been changed to comply with the requirements of the XHTML specification, and to replace stylistic markup with semantic markup. Styling has been removed which had caused it not to fit your screen, and a reference to a user-selected style sheet was added. </blockquote>

HTH.

Cheers, Lee ______________________________**_________________ gutvol-d mailing list gutvol-d@lists.pglaf.org http://lists.pglaf.org/**mailman/listinfo/gutvol-d<http://lists.pglaf.org/mailman/listinfo/gutvol-d>

On 3/3/2012 11:56 AM, James Adcock wrote:

...

Copyright is a governmentally created monopoly that protects a specific creative expression of an idea. The full Project Gutenberg license is no doubt protected by copyright.

My understanding [I am not a lawyer, consult your lawyer] is that legalize is not subject to copyright. IE anyone can use legalize.

Your understanding is incorrect, particularly in light of the Berne Convention Implementation act. Generally (but not always) documents produced by or on behalf of a governmental entity are free from copyright (or perhaps are simply dumped into the "fair use" category -- I'm not quite sure how Berne affects government documents). The U.S. Code can be used without permission, as can any court decision. But an attorney's work product? If it has the "modicum of creativity" required by Feist v. Rural Telephone I would say it is clearly 1. copyrightable, and 2. copyrighted. Attorneys go to rather great lengths to protect their "form files," as they recognize great value in them. There are a number of legal publishers out there who produce books of forms; I doubt any one of them would take kindly to you republishing them. Like all copyrighted material, boilerplate is subject to the usual copyright limitations such as fair use, bare recitation of fact and independent creation. And I doubt that any lawyer is going to go to the extreme of suing you over coping boilerplate. If you do it, just be aware that you /could/ be sued, even if you probably won't.

I read the PG legalize as saying that efforts required to file format translate from one file format to another can still retain the PG license terms.

You may be correct; I haven't bothered to carefully parse the PG legalize because I find it easier to simply remove it. If you choose to continue the PG license into your new work I'm sure Project Gutenberg won't mind. [snip]

Also, please do not follow a common practice on mobiread of scarfing a cover page from a contemporary printing of the work! Such cover art I could think might be under current copyright.

Almost certainly. I think the Internet Archive's "Open Library" project (which is, in fact, not a library) is particularly guilty on this score, and has opened itself up to a huge potential liability.