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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'."
I'm not trying to get around the copyright, but I have an honest question. If I were to download these books and then bring them into the US, would that be an illegal act? Specifically, how would I declare them when coming into the country? I doubt any immigration people have a clue about online books, let alone which ones are copyrighted.
I suppose it's the same case as coming into the US from Amsterdam and carrying weed with you, but it would seem that immigration is probably more apt to ask you about drugs than illegal books.
--trb
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
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I was excited about this for a second until I actually looked at the list. Can you imagine trying to read Dreiser on your monitor? Or, oh my god, James Joyce?
I know this has little do with the point of the article, but I bet I could buy any of these books for 50 cents or so and save money on aspirin and eyeglasses by not circumventing the US copyrights on these works.
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So I'm reading through that list of books which I'm certainly not downloading the background as I type this -- *cough* -- and I noticed Mein Kampf 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?"
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.
In today's "information economy", knowledge is power. And now we have news of a real situation where everybody is allowed to freely access several important pieces of work .. except if you happen to live in the United States, that is. And the irony is that this is because of a particularly silly law from these same United States!
In light of recent events, I wonder if Congress might not be willing to reconsider this law. Broadly interpreted, the intent of this law can almost be considered as treasonous. In a world where knowledge is power, it seems to me that it is borderline sedition to have a government forcibly restrict its citizens from access to knowledge that the rest of the world has for free. I don't see how Congress can (non-hypocritically) express support for U.S. troops in foreign lands while at the same time expressing support for legislation that prevents the American people from arming themselves with information that we may well need to fight the war on terrorism.
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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Why should he do that? It's not his job to police other people. Let Asscroft worry about it.
"The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction you give it." -- Ayn Rand
Presumably because .com domains are not and have never been the exclusive domain of those within the US. It's far from being a reliable method of ensuring that the people downloading are not located in the states - this is the net after all - geography is invisible.
So a warning does the job as well as anything else will. It's not a "statement AGAINST copyright" it's a statement ABOUT copyright. Ie, a fact, not an editorial.
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Because it wouldn't work. As much as you americans would like to think so, 'com' does not mean 'USA-owned'. Nor does 'edu'.
.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.
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
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.
Random and weird software I've written.
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.
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