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In The Non-US Public Domain

Posted by michael on from the don't-touch-that-mouse dept.

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'."

5 of 45 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Wow. Makes ya wonder... by bertilow · · Score: 3, Informative
    I noticed Mein Kampf [gutenberg.net.au] is on the list of copyright-extended titles. The first question that pops into my head is: "Who's getting the royalty checks on that nowadays?"

    That should be Bavaria, the German "land" that holds the copyright of "Mein Kampf".

  2. Lessig is in front of the Supreme Court over this by truthsearch · · Score: 5, Informative

    Lessig is presenting the Eldred v. Ashcroft case in front of the Supreme Court right now. His intent is to overturn the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, which has added 20 years. Lessig is the only publicly visible person I've seen who's actively fighting against copyright abuse.

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  3. Support the cause by quintessent · · Score: 3, Informative

    http://eldred.cc/howyoucanhelp/

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  4. Re:Warning: Don't Do This! by Cecil · · Score: 4, Informative

    Because it wouldn't work. As much as you americans would like to think so, 'com' does not mean 'USA-owned'. Nor does 'edu'.

    My old ISP was named 'niagara.com', because it served the Niagara region of Ontario. Not Niagara Falls, NY. Back in the day, the registrar for 'ca' was pretty anal (still somewhat, but less so) and it was very difficult and expensive to acquire even a '.on.ca' address for Ontario, Canada, much less an actual top-level '.ca' address. So '.com' was slightly shorter, and much cheaper, and much easier, so that was the domain name they used.

    There are many other countries around the world in the same position, not just Canada. I've seen the number of UK companies, for example, that use .com addresses just because people recognize them. And this is from the UK, with the .co.uk domain name that probably is the only thing that is even remotely close to com/net/org as far as mindshare goes. Imagine how countries with obscure country codes feel.

    Secondly, I now run my own reverse DNS servers. It's trivial to change my reverse lookup DNS address to anything I want. It's a hideously insecure way of trying to deal with the problem. You'll get huge numbers of both false negatives, and false positives, and both will make the system useless. It's a bad idea. Repeat after me: Geoprofiling people by domain names is ludicrous.

    Now, perhaps Geoprofiling based on IP addresses is a little bit less hit-and-miss, but it's still not entirely accurate, and I would be pretty miffed if it caught me mistakenly and didn't let me download things that I wanted to download.

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  5. Re:I thought Germany banned this....Re:Wow. Makes by bertilow · · Score: 3, Informative

    If you have read anything about Germany, you will know they are so anti-anti-semetic that they made it illegal to use anti semetic rhetoric. Mein Kampf is certainly nazi propaganda so

    a.) why is is copyrighted
    b.) is not receiving royalties illegal?

    Makes no sense to me!

    Bavaria holds the copyright and uses that copyright to actively stop people from printing and distributing the book. It was printed a few years ago in Sweden, but Bavaria protested, and the book was withdrawn.

    This is of course crazy. "Mein Kampf" is an important historical document, and it should be available in printed form. We must learn from history, not try to bury it.