[PGCanada] Gone With the Wind, redux

Wallace J.McLean ag737 at freenet.carleton.ca
Wed Nov 10 15:34:43 PST 2004


I received the following PM today at Distributed Proofreading:


From: [A DISTRIBUTED PROOFREADING VOLUNTEER'S ALIAS]
To: [DP ALIAS]
Posted: 10 Nov 2004 18:34 
Subject: Another call to arms   

Hello [DP ALIAS], 

You are Canadian, aren't you? I need someone for a rescue operation; 
the pay is lousy* and the risk is ... er ... for you to decide. 

As you know, the Mitchell estate threatened Project Gutenberg Australia 
(PGA) with legal action if they didn't remove their etext of Gone With 
The Wind, and although I do not know whether Col Choat (who effectively 
is PGA) removed that file, all links to it now say "Page not found", or 
something to that effect. 

Luckily, my prodigious googling skills (cough!) allowed me to trace a 
copy. Unfortunately, although I am allowed to download it under [MY 
NATIONAL] copyright law, that same law prohibits me to publish it. 

Could you perhaps download it? I am not asking you to publish it or 
anything (the Mitchell estate lawyers are a lot closer to Canada than 
to Australia), you could at least legally pass it on to someone who is 
allowed to publish it. Also, I believe Michael Hart and John Mark 
Ockerbloom (Online Books Pages) are interested in the whereabouts of 
any surviving copies of their etext. 

Anyway, you can find a non-Gutenberg copy of the text at 
http://www.globusz.com/ebooks/GoneWithTheWind/. Also, part of a copy of 
the Gutenberg version seems to sit in the Google cache: 
http://64.233.183.104/search 
?q=cache:rgeeJ5-OkIUJ:gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200161.txt 
+%22gone+with+the+wind%22 
+Plain+Vanilla+Electronic+Texts 
&hl=en. Truncated at some point, it is not very useful reading 
material, but perhaps it can be used to establish whether Globusz used 
the Gutenberg version. 

The search strings I used were: 

"gone with the wind" plain vanilla electronic texts 

and 

"Melanie and Pittypat had gone" 

I don't know if this is necessary; the Canadian volunteer who produced 
the text is known, and I would not be surprised if he still owned a 
copy, or even the original. In which case it could be rescanned and ran 
through DP Europe. 

Perhaps I am getting too worked up over nothing. I hope I am not 
inconveniencing you too much. 

Thanks, 

*) As in: non-existant.






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