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In The Non-US Public Domain
truthsearch writes "Lawrence Lessig's weblog points to 'a page by John Mark Ockerbloom at the University of Pennsylvania listing books that are in the public domain elsewhere but not, because of the Copyright Term Extension Act, in the United States. Check out the books you are not allowed to download.' Includes books like 'Animal Farm' and '1984'."
Do NOT download or read these books online if you or your system are in the United States or in another country where copyright protections can extend more than 50 years past an author's death.
Why doesn't he institute some way of preventing anyone with a .com, .edu, or .us domain from downloading them? If this is "warning: don't do this" website is intended to make some kind of statement against US copyright law, then he should just come out and say it. This reminds me of the Ren & Stimpy episode (Space Madness) where Ren places Stimpy in charge of guarding the History Eraser Button: "What ever you do, don't touch it!"
GMD
watch this
Kids, next time when you want to find the meaning for the (presumably) Spanish word "hupia", don't google, don't click on the third link and no, don't download the page even through Google's cache. You'll be violating a couple of copyright laws, not the least of which is the Copyright extension thing.
I mean, we still haven't seen any "Michael Crichton is dead at 58" trolls, have we?
More than mere navel gazing.
One should be carefule loading Finnegans Wake on a computer. It's a hell of a resource hog: being that it's implemented as a huge infinite loop.
Yet Another Web Site
this reminds me of the choice you are presented with when downloading the debian cd iso's from sites outside america (like my own country, australia)
for the first cd you are given the choice of two versions - disk1, and disk1-non-us (labels not exact here)
one's initial reaction is to think - hey, i want what all those lousy american bastards are getting, i'll go with the standard disk1
however a little more reading shows you that the non-us cd actually contains lots of goodies that those lousy american bastards are unable to legally obtain - mostly security and encryption stuff
same with this page - those ppl fortunate enough to be living in america - 'land of the free' - are unable to obtain these books due to their government making a pact with the corporate devil sometime in the late 70s early 80s
those of us living having to make do with living outside the borders of the 'leader of the free world' are however able to access them
this, my dear american friends, is called irony