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This might help: https://www.gutenberg.org/wiki...
And, the updated "Rule 6 How-To" at https://copy.pglaf.org/

For something published in the US after 1923 and before 1964, renewal of copyright was necessary to get a further 28-year extension. (Term extensions in 1998 extended copyright of items published in 1964 onward, and removed the need to renew.)

The Rule 6 how-to has a template for non-renewal research that might satisfy YouTube, if you do the research and send it in.

Only around 10% of items published from 1923 onwards were renewed. (It's no longer required, but you can still renew today.) The US Library of Congress has records of copyright registrations and renewals, and the Rule 6 How-To describes where to get the records. For items from 1923-1963, the renewals for printed items are comprehensive.

Serialization is sometimes a problem. Items might have been published, then published in another form (say, a magazine article that was published as a book), and if the timing is close enough one renewal might cover both items.

Proving something is in the public domain in the US, for printed items, is not that hard for items published from 1923-1963. It takes some time and expertise, and there is always a chance there is a renewal that you didn't find. Proving it is still copyrighted is also easy: show me the renewal.

    - Greg

They did. The sent a letter of apology to Bear and took down the book.

http://cand.pglaf.org/bear-response.txt [pglaf.org]

My apologies for my long delay in responding. As promised in
September, I discussed the situation with one of Project Gutenberg's
copyright lawyers. This particular lawyer had previously been very
helpful in preparing and then providing legal advice and feedback on
our procedures for determining non-renewal status.

Our lawyer advised that our non-renewal determination for The Escape
was in error. Therefore, on October 1, I removed The Escape from the
Project Gutenberg collections and catalog and announced its removal
to our mailing list.

On behalf of Project Gutenberg, I apologize for the error.

> Folks at Project Gutenberg are obviously aware of the potential for a lawsuit. They would like to have one,
> so that the decision on the copyright status of these works is made concrete.

No actually PG doesn't want a lawsuit. They are expensive even when you win. This was one work in a grey area of the law. PG removed the work on October 1st, long before the estate made public complaint about PG. "The Escape" wasn't a complete publication. "Brainwave" is where it was published completely. It's arguable that the filing for "Brainwave" isn't valid because it didn't include the prior publication information in the filing. It doesn't look like PG is willing to fight over it though.

See http://cand.pglaf.org/bear-response.txt for the email response PG sent to the estate on October 25th. Again long before the estate made public complaint.

It looks like a smear campaign against PG because the estate is in a snit because PG won't remove the rest of the works that are not still in copyright.

The Anderson/Bear folks posted this a couple of places, and it was picked up a few other places. Here is the text of the most recent substantial message I sent them on the topic: http://cand.pglaf.org/bear-response.txt . The group has not provided the author/title (or PG eBook number) of any title they think was wrongly determined to be non-renewed, other than those mentioned in the email. They seem to have some theories about what is eligible for renewal, or who can renew, but these are not contested by Project Gutenberg (in fact, our policy is to NOT to question whether renewals were fully compliant with the law, nor whether a person had the correct standing to renew).

The issue is whether a renewal was made. For The Escape, part 1 was republished with a different title, complete with part 2. Part 1 was not individually renewed, but the newly titled complete work was. We were unaware of the subsequent retitled republication, so did not find the renewal. For the purposes of copyright and renewal, a major outcome of the legal advice we received concerning The Escape is that serialized works are treated as single acts of authorship. Thus, renewal of a part may be considered to apply to the whole -- provided it happens within a reasonable timespan (we have been advised to use +/- four years).

The Project Gutenberg Copyright How-To has details on our procedures, although the Rule 6 how-to there (for non-renewals) is older than the version we used for the original Anderson/Escape non-renewal determination. We are working on a revision that will include additional research for serials, and a few other variations like republication with different titles. The how-to is here: www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:Copyright_How-To

For those who aren't aware, Project Gutenberg is classified in the US as a 501(c)(3) charity, as a library. With over 35,000 published titles, and well over 50,000 unique instances of copyright research (thousands for our Rule 6), it's not surprising that we make occasional errors. To date (I've been doing this aspect of volunteer work for Project Gutenberg since around 1999), we've changed our stance on fewer than 1/2 dozen public domain determinations. Not perfect, but I believe we're doing a good job overall, and have some very solid procedures by copyright experts over the years.

I first initiated our Rule 6 nearly 10 years ago. This was because I saw that of all the books and serials published in the US from 1923-1963 (when renewal was required for copyright to still apply), 85--90% were never renewed. The US Library of Congress does annual reports on this. Statistically, that means there a million or so items from 1923-1964 whose copyright expired after a 28-year term. These items have been in the public domain in the US since 1992 or earlier (1964+28), and many are out of print. As a policy decision, Project Gutenberg decided it was worth the risk of occasionally missing a renewal, to be able to affirmatively identify the many items for which no renewal occurred. I still believe this decision was the right one.

For those who are paying attention to Project Gutenberg news today, there was a story in the Washington Post that, more or less, accused Amazon of abusing their customers by selling public domain Project Gutenberg works, with DRM added, for a fee. The article is here: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fasterforward/2010/11/amazon_charges_kindle_users_fo.html . (I exchanged several emails with the author.) It's a weird coincidence that within the same 24 hour period there is another story that basically accuses Project Gutenberg of stealing.

Enough for now. I'm going back to reading Marusek's "Mind over Ship" (sequel to the excellent "Counting Heads"), one of the hundreds of printed books I purchase every year. Maybe before I shut down for the evening I'll post Doctorow's "Makers"

No, actually Greg Newby of Project Gutenberg sent Greg Bear a letter acknowledging that they had made a mistake and took the book down.

http://cand.pglaf.org/bear-response.txt

My apologies for my long delay in responding. As promised in
September, I discussed the situation with one of Project Gutenberg's
copyright lawyers. This particular lawyer had previously been very
helpful in preparing and then providing legal advice and feedback on
our procedures for determining non-renewal status.

Our lawyer advised that our non-renewal determination for The Escape
was in error. Therefore, on October 1, I removed The Escape from the
Project Gutenberg collections and catalog and announced its removal
to our mailing list.

On behalf of Project Gutenberg, I apologize for the error.

Project Gutenberg clears works under "Rule 6"; some works which appear to be orphaned, published before 1963, are in fact in the public domain, but it takes a significant amount of legwork to prove this.

They've also advocated for reform on orphan works, so they have been active on this.

Distributed Proofreaders harvests a lot of data from Google Book Search, already, as well.

No, now that Google has put the brunt of their weight and money on the issue, I would dare to say the next person who comes along will simply need to pay for the scanning service and access to the library.

Yeah, good luck with that. You'll notice that Project Gutenberg still gets nastygrams with no real legal backing; there's a reason they retain legal staff, despite being incredibly diligent about their copyrights. (I'm unaware of any cleared work turning out to actually be restricted; they generally take down a work temporarily on request, giving the contacting party a certain amount of time to come up with a renewal record.)

The result of this system is that, no matter what you think the law says, anyone with lawyers at their disposal can ruin you if they wish.

I didn't notice anyone mentioning international issues with the public domain. Thanks to my involvement with Project Gutenberg, I'm often in the situation where something that is public domain in one place is still under copyright protection elsewhere.

Project Gutenberg has long held that by making something in the public domain available, we do not infringe in places where that public domain item is not in the public domain. So, for example, PG's eBook of Peter Pan is public domain in the US and most other places, but not in the UK.

We have regularly stood up to claimants from non-US countries (and, in the case of Gone with the Wind, in the US: complaining about the PG of Australia organization), saying that infringement is committed by infringers -- not by those *legally* making an item available. We haven't been sued yet, and like the RIAA case there are aspects of copyright law that don't have much legal precedent. (Internationally, there are few precedents.)

The idea that infringement is done by infringers, not by those with legal rights to an item, is a very important distinction. Presumably there might be issues for conspiracy to infringe, for traffickers, and those who profit by fostering an environment for infringement. But for the everyday person with legal rights to an item, the ability to rip, store, share, etc. would be nice to confirm.

Another related aspect: what if I rip a CD (or whatever) I legally own, and make it available for download, and you own the same item and download it. Confirming this is non-infringing would really help... an analogous situation would be digitizing an eBook from a printed volume I own, and you own...even if the book is copyrighted, can we share the digital copy?

The final point for US residents is the anti-circumvention provision of copyright law. If we can confirm these various rights, does that mean that bypassing DRM etc. is legit? While there is deemphasis on DRM for music currently, it's still pretty strong for video, for the dedicated eBook formats, and re-emerging with Blu-Ray discs. I don't think DRM (or spawn of DRM) is dead yet. gbn

The letter is from the publisher's Canadian representative and objects to the distribution of scores that are still under copyright in Canada.

Furthermore, insofar as the site is available to people in the EU, the publisher can claim that it is engaged in copyright violation in the EU and take legal action in the EU resulting in a judgment that would be enforceable in Canada.

We (Project Gutenberg) haven't received anything from IMSLP yet, and depending on how easy it is to identify materials that are public domain in thUS, we might not be able to immediately redistribute it. But I did correspond with the person who runs IMSLP (when the issue first came up, not just recently) and do anticipate we'll be able to help. It's great to see the /. coverage of Michael's note to the BookPeople mailing list (the main link in the slashdot story thread), but at this point there's not a lot to report...

A few extra things:
- Thanks to everyone who has said nice things about Project Gutenberg :)
- Yes, we pledge to continue "fighting the good fight" for appropriateness of copyright enforcement
- The Universal music claims are, as others have noted, legally unsupported here in the US. (I don't know whether anything relevant is different in Canada)
- We maintain some of our past letters to these types of claims at http://cand.pglaf.org/ (cand == Cease And Desist :-). This includes telling the Mitchell estate the PG-US doesn't control PG-AU, where "Gone with the Wind" is posted, and there is no reason why PG-AU would need to block downloaders from elsewhere
- We have also argued many times that *if* there is infringement (say in the UK, an EU country, etc.) then it is up to the infringed-upon party to take action, not Project Gutenberg. (We even offer to help, by writing a general letter explaining that people should check the laws of their country before downloading...as stated in every public domain eBook and on the gutenberg.org Web site)
- Among other things, the rejection of IP address blocking (as proposed by Universal) can rest on the simple fact that even downloading a copyright item might not be a copyright violation:
-- many countries have notions of "fair use" that allow such use of copyrighted content
-- what if the downloader owns the item in question already (say, they own the sheet music in print form, and want it digitally)?
-- what if the downloader is not where the IP address maps to?
-- other examples you can think of...

    Greg Newby (of Project Gutenberg)

It's no an immediate problem, and it's possible that GoogleBooks or another player will get there before PG does.

There are about a million works from 1923-1964 that are public domain, due to non-renewal of copyright (our Rule 6 in the PG Copyright HOWTO at www.gutenberg.org). Those will keep us busy... there are also lots of pamphlets, posters, manuscripts and other non-book items. Many government publications which were not (and are still not) copyrighted. Early film, photographs, etc. Many things to work on beyond books. Lots of non-US stuff, too.

Meanwhile, we have a few million items left just to complete all books in the public domain. Maybe by the time we're running low on such items, there will be new additions to the public domain again. The clock stopped in 1998, but is scheduled to start again in 2019 (due to Sonny Bono's last act [the one after he skied into a tree]). I'm not holding my breath, though -- another copyright term extension seems likely before then, given that Larry Lessig's failed attempt to challenge Sonny basically gave carte blanche to congress to have perpetual copyrights. As long as they only extend a few decades at a time!

Michael Hart's blog has some very detailed analysis of copyright term extensions over history. Very interesting reading, and using facts that are not disputed, but seldom pulled together in one cogent essay.

At least in Canada, they have Life+50 copyright, so that they celebrate Public Domain Day every January 1. (This year: Albert Einstein! Next year: A. A. Milne! And so forth.) There's talk of setting up a Project Gutenberg in Canada, so at least old works from that era will be preserved, if not made legally available in most places. (Australia also has Life+50, but I think that's changing, alas.)

In any case, the set of books copyrighted by January 1, 1923 (not 1922) is indeed finite, but you might be interested to know (see Free Culture, p. 147) that the average copyright term in 1973 in the US was 32.2 years, because most (more than 85% of) works were not renewed. Due to retroactive extensions and associated bullshit, after 1978, works created 1964 or later were automatically renewed. But Project Gutenberg has a Rule 6 to deal with that. Consider (I think you may have to sign in to see this) Plague Ship , by Andre Norton, published in 1956, currently being post-processed.

'Course, the fact that folks are working hard to drag works into the public domain where they would be in a sane legal system at this point doesn't invalidate your original point. But Project Gutenberg isn't about to run out of material, not when they have a big chunk of the 20th century to deal with. (They just don't have anything particularly popular from that period.)

Oh, and PG doesn't really have 16,000 books. Some works were released in little bitty pieces. Consider an example. But there are still, I think I've seen estimated, around 10,000 real, individual titles in there. (Of course, any measure that counts the encyclopedia-sized "Modern Machine-Shop Practice" and the Declaration of Independence equally can't really be that accurate, now can it?)

Assuming the work was written only by American citizens:

Actually, if no one renewed the copyright (renewal became automatic for works published in 1964 or later), it may be public domain. Read the new and improved Rule 6 HOWTO that the fine folks at Project Gutenberg have put together. You can put together a reasonable case that copyright was not renewed, and heck, maybe you could get PG to pick up the book.

Or you could move to Canada and wait until January 1, 2013, when the author's work will enter the public domain there. (Life+50, and all.)

Out of curiosity, what was the book and the author?

Project Gutenberg 2 is not affiliated with the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and has received no funding, materials, or any other support from the Foundation.

We just dropped off about 300 free CDs at the Berkeley Public Library last week (stop by the Info Desk for a copy), during some recent events. As others have pointed out, libraries don't really want to catalog and manage stuff, nor do they want to worry about broken and scratched CDs. So, give 'em a spindle of 100 burned CDs or DVDs and let these discs walk out the door!

There are a lot of challenges to making this work truly smoothly (like the cost of putting a nice label on the CD, and troubles with competing DVD formats that don't always read correctly, and who's willing to burn them), but if the goal is to get content "out there," why bother with lending when it only costs a few cents to just give away a CD?

At Gutenberg, we're trying to start a volunteer-based effort that will let anyone request one of our CDs or DVDs via a Web form, then we'll send it to them by postal mail -- free! For a few hours of volunteers' time per month, and minimal costs (donated or reimbursed), why not!

• Greg

ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/cdimages/ pgdvd.iso (md5sum 59d8a193874349181122ff52e2e3e114, size 4139646976)

Help yourself, make a bunch of copies, and be sure to give them away! If you'd like to donate a few copies (or a few hundred) for the giveaway, drop me an email