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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
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?"
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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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.
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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