Project Gutenberg

[JSWolf]

Are books available from Project Gutenberg allowed on Mobileread?

[Quoth]

Why wouldn't they be? If you mean the main project, not the Australia and Canadian sites.

Edit:
USA Magazines got the author's copyright and then if the magazine didn't renew, the work became PD (in the USA). So not all Gutenberg USA content is actually author's life +70, which is the Mobileread rule.

it's complicated. Complain to Disney and USA Government.

Edit 2:
Then there are works that are publishing house names. No point in looking up death of Laura Hope, Franklin Dixon, Caroline Keen and others. Some will be PD and some not. Those people never existed. Some of the best Caroline Keen were by Mildred Birt.

[graycyn]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Are books available from Project Gutenberg allowed on Mobileread?

Some would be, some wouldn't. It's not a black-and-white yes or no, you have to do the research to find out when an author or illustrating artist died.

If the author/artist died before 1954 (year of death 1953 or earlier) you should be good to upload here.

MobileRead, whose servers are based in Europe, follows European copyright law, so life of the author plus 70 years.

Project Gutenberg is US-based and follows US copyright law:

"PG is entirely based in the US, and we follow the United States laws for copyright. Not all items that are public domain in the US are public domain in other countries, and vice versa. If you are operating outside of the US, you should get professional guidance on how to proceed for things like redistributing Project Gutenberg’s content. For basic information about copyright elsewhere, try this link to the Online books page."

There will be SOME overlap, i.e. books that are public domain in the USA and *also* in Europe. But it's definitely NOT every book that is available from Project Gutenberg.


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[graycyn]

Originally Posted by Quoth

it's complicated. Complain to Disney and USA Government.

True, true words. Complicated and head-banging, hair-pulling FRUSTRATING!

I've a book. Non-fiction. Limited edition, only 850 copies printed, first published in 1930. So, two more years until public domain in USA.

Fun facts, the author died young, sudden heart attack, in 1940.

So you think YAY, MobileRead eligible!

Not so fast. The primary reason the book has any value are the ILLUSTRATIONS, which are lavish, and in case of the black-and-white illustrations, mostly sketched on site, DURING, and of the events the author is narrating!

The book has become much harder to find because people literally CUT UP COPIES to sell the illustrations separately as wall art on eBay.

The author only wrote ONE book. Not a writer by profession, though his text is kind of fun. Much of the book is illustration! So it doesn't feel right to present the text without the accompanying illustration.

The illustrator is well-known and very collected. But HE didn't die until 1958, so FIVE more years before MR eligible.

Meanwhile, the whole shebang is public domain as far as I can determine, under Canadian copyright law.

It is, indeed, complicated!

[graycyn]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Are books available from Project Gutenberg allowed on Mobileread?

Just a thought, you can, legally, publish any book available from Project Gutenberg on the Internet Archive, which is also USA-based and follows USA Copyright law, just like PG does.

I am contemplating doing this next year with the 1929 illustrated version of Black Storm.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by graycyn

Just a thought, you can, legally, publish any book available from Project Gutenberg on the Internet Archive, which is also USA-based and follows USA Copyright law, just like PG does.

I am contemplating doing this next year with the 1929 illustrated version of Black Storm.

That's a backward step as PG texts are human proofed and PG since inception in 1971, AFAIK, has never been sued. IA has opaque governance, no human proofreading, poor at taking down content that contravenes USA copyright, gets sued, makes their own rules on copyright content for their open library. They have multiple PDF scans on free download that are in copyright. They have gone way beyond being the "wayback machine" for internet content.

Also PG has multiple mirrors and instructions how to download all of it or make a mirror. PG also accepts uploads, though they have idea on formatting that make sense to them. No user decided formatting. But their content, unlike Standard ebooks, is easily reformated.

Other PD sites are Sacred Texts, Global Grey, Standard ebooks and Canadian Faded Page (which does have content that meets USA PD as well as extra content using Canadian rules which are differently complicated). There was an Australian one but was taken down when Australia signed USA Trade deal (TPP or something?).

Also of course if you want to read PD The Golem, you need to read in German. The English is too new.

UK has a perpetual Crown Copyright on some things, including the King James AV Bible, which isn't original. But Matthew Henry's Commentary has the entire AV in it and is PD.

Alice Underground/Alice in Wonderland is PD. But a particular layout will be copyright and illustrations of later editions are copyright.

If someone takes a PD text and nicely formats it and sells it as an ebook, that's copyright and can't be freely distributed unless they say so, but you can buy it, extract the text and do your own proof and formatting and give that away or resell it.

So even if author and illustrator is dead 70+ and USA, an edition of an ebook (or paper) can be copyright. You can though extract the text and illustrations and do a new edition.

It's a minefield!

[Quoth]

Also while a title can't be copyrighted and you can have Harry Potter, the seedy detective (because the names are only copyright in context), there may be be valid Registered Trademarks, such as Disney, Batman.
But pre-existing phrases such as "Winter is coming" can't be protected, despite what the studio says. Also while copying the actual DC Superman would be plagiarism, the name is a weak trademark because it exists in multiple books before Detective Comics registered it. OTOH the USA Apple Inc, formerly Apple Computer Inc lost cases to the Beatles multiple times, as they deliberately picked the name invented by the Beatles, Apple Corp, with a bitten Apple logo, though Beatles' logo was a core and Apple Computer had one bite (the Apple 1 & 2 had 1 byte cpu ). One settlement was that they would not sell music. You can reuse a trademark in a different context. Later Apple USA launched iTunes and lost another case. They also had to pay Cisco for iPhone (as it's a related field) and Fujitsu for iPad (umm, almost same product!).

Intellectual property can be complicated and big companies (Vogue, McDonald's, Coca-Cola etc) rely on bullying as much as real legal rights to attack unrelated companies, or something they think is too similar. Often the deepest pockets and US mega Corp in a USA court will win.

Then there are historic names. A new company could never be Royal Mail or Eircom (nor Eir which they are now), but these are privatised state entities and mysteriously allowed to keep the State name. Eir isn't even an Irish company (registered in Channel Islands for "tax") and Royal Mail may soon be owned by a Czech business.

[graycyn]

Well, that's why I specified that I am "contemplating" it.

I've never uploaded anything to the IA, and it's unclear to me whether they leave user epub content "as is" or whether they convert it like they do their own scanned stuff. If the latter, UGH!

My point is that publishing the text of a book that has entered the US public domain is OK to do on IA. As long as the text is ALL public domain and has not had added copyrighted content of any sort.


I absolutely agree that the IA is not good about policing the SCADS of material, much under copyright, that people upload. They remove violations if reported, but don't take steps to prevent such content being uploaded again and again. Which is why publishers and authors have a very legit beef with the IA!

On the other hand, I can appreciate the fact the IA scans and loans older, OOP books. Buy a book on eBay, discover a missing page, you might be able to get the missing text through an Open Library loan. I did just that with a book that I'm slowly working on that's MR eligible.

And I use things like the archived US copyright records on IA to research stuff. The IA is a resource, in spite of the many flaws.

But yeah, copyright is a HUGE minefield.

[Calenorn]

Originally Posted by Quoth

Some of the best Caroline Keen were by Mildred Birt.

Mildred Wirt Benson

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mildred_Benson

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by Calenorn

Mildred Wirt Benson

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mildred_Benson

Arrgh. Yes, that's the one. Well, you can tell I didn't look it up! She was rather good.

[John F]

I seem to recall that in the past, direct copies of PG books in the MR library was frowned upon; either make some modifications or beautify it, but no direct copies?

[Lukusaukko]

Originally Posted by Quoth

Other PD sites are Sacred Texts, Global Grey, Standard ebooks and Canadian Faded Page (which does have content that meets USA PD as well as extra content using Canadian rules which are differently complicated). There was an Australian one but was taken down when Australia signed USA Trade deal (TPP or something?).

Isn't there still an Australian Gutenberg site at https://gutenberg.net.au/ or is that not legit? And another PD site at https://freeread.com.au/.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by John F

I seem to recall that in the past, direct copies of PG books in the MR library was frowned upon; either make some modifications or beautify it, but no direct copies?

Well, what's the point of a direct copy anyway?

[John F]

Originally Posted by Quoth

Well, what's the point of a direct copy anyway?

So one doesn't have to search multiple sites?

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by John F

I seem to recall that in the past, direct copies of PG books in the MR library was frowned upon; either make some modifications or beautify it, but no direct copies?

General Book Uploads Posting Guidelines:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...ad.php?t=14163

6. Uploads here should add some notable "value" to a PG (or whatever) original (for example: nice reformatting, artwork, a TOC, footnotes, etc etc). There's really no point in posting here something which which a poster can get from the original source in two minutes.