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'."

Comments

Re:My selfish perspective

[foistboinder]

Or, oh my god, James Joyce?

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.

land of the free - ironic

[solferino]

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