MobileRead Guideline Refinements

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Well, I don't find anything redeeming about a book about pedophilia. With that said, unless there's something else to say pertaining to the new guidelines, that's it for this awful book.

I suggest you take it up with aforesaid literary minds of the century -- surely they are not all lacking any redeeming factors? Surely they must have had something to justify it with?

But by all means, continue decrying the great evil of classic literature. I am sure your insights will catch everyone by surprise.

[Alexander Turcic]

Originally Posted by Lynx-lynx

Something that's been puzzling me about the servers being moved to the US is that it would seem that MR is now under US law, is that right?

If that is the case then it makes it very easy for US security agencies to 'officially' 'break into' MR data. That is, account holders email address, PM's - anything that isn't posted on the public side of the Forum .....

I am not a lawyer, and especially with International laws, things are quite murky. Now, I'm not particularly concerned about a law agency breaking into MR, for there wouldn't be any reason for them to do so. Technically, MR is operated from Switzerland, but again, this would probably not be of interest to any US-based agency. We hosted our servers in Canada for many years, but it didn't stop US-based copyright holders sending out (usually fake) DMCA notices. In addition, our Canadian hoster was recently acquired by Internap, an Atlanta-based company no less.

Oh, and all without asking of course. In fact we the individuals wouldn't be informed that our private data had been observed/taken, and neither would the 'owner' of the site be informed of their impending action/s. All in the name of 'security' of course.

I suppose that's true, hypothetically speaking. Though I don't see how anyone would have an interest in doing so against a community sharing its love for eBooks and eBook gadgets.

Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward

Alex,

I am concerned about the move into a US server. That makes the library subject to US copyright laws, unless I'm gravely mistaken, and US copyright laws do not follow life + 70 rules, but its own bizarre set of copyright rules. Check with Greg Weeks at Project Gutenberg US....

Ralph, I am not an copyright expert (Harry knows a lot more about it than I do!), but the general US rule is that exclusive rights expire 70 years after the author's death. When there are exceptions we will of course honor them.

[Greg Anos]

Originally Posted by Alexander Turcic

I am not a lawyer, and especially with International laws, things are quite murky. Now, I'm not particularly concerned about a law agency breaking into MR, for there wouldn't be any reason for them to do so. Technically, MR is operated from Switzerland, but again, this would probably not be of interest to any US-based agency. We hosted our servers in Canada for many years, but it didn't stop US-based copyright holders sending out (usually fake) DMCA notices. In addition, our Canadian hoster was recently acquired by Internap, an Atlanta-based company no less.



I suppose that's true, hypothetically speaking. Though I don't see how anyone would have an interest in doing so against a community sharing its love for eBooks and eBook gadgets.



Ralph, I am not an copyright expert (Harry knows a lot more about it than I do!), but the general US rule is that exclusive rights expire 70 years after the author's death. When there are exceptions we will of course honor them.

Alex, here is a quickie on US copyright (I have a sticky about it somewhere around here on the site.) Anything released in the US before 1923 is PD. Anything after 1922 is still under copyright, no matter when the author died, unless copyright was not renewed after the first 28 year period. (copyright had been 28 + 28 years until 1978). While there is a life + 70 on the books, the repeated extensions of copyight on work not in the Public Domain as of 1978, (currently it is 95 years) render the point moot.

Let me give you an example. Zane Grey wrote very popular westerns. He died in 1939. Is his works PD in the US? Only the ones published before 1923. The rest are still under copyright in the US, even though they went PD in the rest of the life + 70 world in 2010. A simple rule of thumb is that if it isn't on Project Gutenberg US, most likely it's not PD here.

I don't want to be a Grumpy Gus, but I think you are at serious risk, should somebody complain...

[Alexander Turcic]

Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward

I don't want to be a Grumpy Gus, but I think you are at serious risk, should somebody complain...

Ralph, I appreciate the concern. If someone complained, we would of course immediately investigate further if we or the uploader missed something.

I like your rule thumb (using PG as a reference) and the note of the extensions. We'll add this to the upload guidelines ASAP.

[GeoffC]

It's OK calling MR an ebook related site, but I bet there's a wealth of radical stuff available for the devices. They could snoop just to check!

Interesting thought about sexual content. Do you have a line between porn and erotica, or are they both classed in the same manner? The former would directly mention the "bits", the other would subtly imply them

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by Alexander Turcic

Ralph, I appreciate the concern. If someone complained, we would of course immediately investigate further if we or the uploader missed something.

I like your rule thumb (using PG as a reference) and the note of the extensions. We'll add this to the upload guidelines ASAP.

Of course it must be US PG as there are others operating on different rules. Also the US rules apply primarily to US authors and those who specifically registered their works in the US and renewed in the US, otherwise they follow life+70.

Dale

[Lin2412]

Thanks for this info. I've been in the forum just this year but it's already been months. I may be guilty of not looking into this beforehand. There are no specific restrictions to links as long as they are related content to the thread right? And as long as they don't have explicit contents as well?

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by Lin2412

Thanks for this info. I've been in the forum just this year but it's already been months. I may be guilty of not looking into this beforehand. There are no specific restrictions to links as long as they are related content to the thread right? And as long as they don't have explicit contents as well?

Links are usually fine, but no direct links to sites telling how to do DRM removal. No spam.

Dale

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by DaleDe

Links are usually fine, but no direct links to sites telling how to do DRM removal. No spam.

Dale

No direct links to download the tools.

The purpose of this announcement is to amend the previous policy from "no direct links to DeDRM guides" to "yes direct links to DeDRM guides".

[Greg Anos]

Originally Posted by DaleDe

Of course it must be US PG as there are others operating on different rules. Also the US rules apply primarily to US authors and those who specifically registered their works in the US and renewed in the US, otherwise they follow life+70.

Dale

Dale, no longer true. There was a SCOTUS ruling 2-3 years ago that extended copyright to those work s that would still be under copyright in the US is they hadn't been filed. (Things like the score to Peter and the Wolf, for example.

[paxmark1]

Hi, I really do not think that life plus 70 is applicable if you are on us of a servers.

For other people to query, I would suggest Mark Bear of Project Gutenberg Canada and Simon at Distributed Proofreaders Canada and Fadedpage.com which serves the finished books from DPC (Distributed Proofreaders Canada).

To be blunt, we are under the gun of the mega-corporations up here in Canada in danger of losing our life plus 50 from them and the ilk of Harper. Pushing out Hemingway and C.S. Lewis in truly open source will not cease up here, but it could be a bit of a wait for authors who died in 1966 on for 19 years if the Harperites and crony corporations get their chance.

I have absolutely no regrets leaving the us of a. I am sometime overly a dark cloud on the horizon type, but I think you may have more than a few regrets moving to a usa server.

Just added a link to an Amazon ebook to a post and the automatic addition of the MR tag as the source for a click through works just fine.

Clear back in the late latter part of the 1990s I put a lot of effort into creating a personal web site. One aspect of that was writing extensive reviews of books that I really liked and at the end including a link to the book at Amazon with my web site identified as the click through source. I actually did pretty well by it at the time, I was able to buy a book every one to two months based on credits received. This was before ebooks. Of course the person clicking through had to make the purchase then. Not go back and search Amazon for the book. Great idea for MR. I'm sure every little bit helps.

I was going to make some comments about content allowed in MR Library, but being opposed to any censorship at all (other than the legally required copyright issues) maybe I'm better off not raising the questions.

[PeterT]

Alex; we've seen some users make use of various URL shortening tools offered by their respective corporate masters. See for instance this post https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...1&postcount=17 that describes some of the Amazon and Google corporate tools (and browse the thread that message is in Gifting Kobo eBooks?) to see some of the "discussions" that ensued.

Any chance of documenting these as legal options?

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by PeterT

Alex; we've seen some users make use of various URL shortening tools offered by their respective corporate masters. See for instance this post https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...1&postcount=17 that describes some of the Amazon and Google corporate tools (and browse the thread that message is in Gifting Kobo eBooks?) to see some of the "discussions" that ensued.

Any chance of documenting these as legal options?

I hope not. I find them obnoxious.

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I hope not. I find them obnoxious.

I find the fact that you care to be obnoxious.

Originally Posted by Alexander Turcic

We do have code in place to automatically unshorten the amzn link when clicked upon, which would technically be required to add the tag. It's not optimized yet because it would query Amazon's servers for the full URL every time a user views a post containing such a link. That would slow down user experience, which nobody wants. We might make it work in the future by adding some caching functionality.

There really isn't a way to simply add it as an alternative domain?

http://amzn.com/B000QTEA3I
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000QTEA3I/ref=cm_sw_su_dp

MR should edit those to be
http://amzn.com/B000QTEA3I?tag=mr060-20 <-- click and see.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000QTEA3I/ref=cm_sw_su_dp?tag=mr060-20

Amazon understands/redirects all four of those links as:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000QTEA3I/ref=cm_sw_su_dp?tag=mr060-20