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Project Gutenberg Threatened Over PG Australia
Jon Noring writes "Michael Hart's venerable Project Gutenberg, based in the United States, is now being threatened with a lawsuit from the estate of the long-deceased author of 'Gone With The Wind.' The threat is being made because Project Gutenberg of Australia (link not provided) has the digital text version of GWTW on its server (GWTW is Public Domain in Australia), which, according to the estate's lawyers, is downloadable from the United States. Further information, including the copy of the 'take down' letter, and some commentary, is given at TeleRead. It is likely the threat is legally meritless, yet it is troubling, showing how online repositories of public domain works may be impacted by threats from other countries where the works are still covered under copyright."
In TFA it was stated that the author died in 1949, international copyright expired in 1999, but US copyright (thanks to Bono act) will expire in 2019 or never (whichever has deeper pockets).
According to Wiki - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Mitchell. She died in 1949.
This will mean works that are now in the 50-70 year period after the death of the creator will be back under copyright. :-(
That and we'll all start enjoying the US's wonderful software patents...
You'll find the illegal contraband on this page.
And here are some nyud.net cachelinks to the ebook in question:
Margaret MITCHELL (1900-1949)
Please spread this work far and wide. Also remember that this is the same greedy estate that killed off a great derivative work entitled The Wind Done Gone . This sort of extreme Intellectual Property protectionism is counter-productive to the intent of copyright, and we must put a stop to it.
(posted anonymously to preempt karma-whoring whiners.)
>This is just America bashing with no basis in truth.
No, it's actually US greedy copyright holding corporation bashing and the way they'd like the law to work.
There is (From the GWTW Ebook):
Unfortunately we just re-elected our conservative US-Loving government, who will gladly feed us to a pack of dogs if the US asked for it. John Howard is completely spineless.
Fuck it makes me made that the dick heads of this country voted them in again.
-- The doctor said I wouldn't get so many nose bleeds if I just kept my finger out of there!
Are here
My pics.
Which countries would this be? France has sued google for allowing other companies to use certain word phrases, France & Germany have sued Yahoo US over Nazi stuff.
Almost plausable but not true - I just accessed it from Japan.
I got access denied right now, from Denmark.
There's a certain difference between this and the issue at hand here though.
When did France supposedly sue Google? I haven't heard of that.
But as for the Yahoo cae: France and Germany were trying to enforce their own laws on their own territory. They weren't trying to stop Yahoo US from selling Nazi stuff, they were trying to stop them from selling them to people in France and Germany, where such a sale would be illegal.
It seems a relatively reasonable given that there isn't any international law on this subject.
The case at hand here is a copyright issue. The international rules here are clearer. It's not much a matter of interpretation because this stuff is adressed in the Berne Convention, which the USA has signed.
As far as I understand Berne, the person downloading from the USA is the one committing the infringement, and liable under US copyright law. But the person in Australia serving the text which isn't copyrighted there is not commiting any crime.
I think you're comparing an apple to an orange here.
Get Gone With the Wind from Gutenberg Australia:
as txt (2.3MB)
as zip
I also am in Japan but get the access denied page. I guess it depends how reliably the website detects your IP's geolocation.
Of course you can always check out the google cache if you're desperate.
I just got "access denied" from my office and home machines in the UK. Looks like it's down to the quality of the geo-location software, as another poster suggested.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Lets not forget Belgium's law which allowed prosecution of accused war criminals anywhere in the world in Belgian courts. (The Belgian Parliament has since scaled back that legislation).
While not one of the litigants, PG was an Amicus curiae (Friend of the Court) in Eldred vs. Ashcroft.
Join moola.com, play games to earn money.
IIRC that was one of the reasons given for introducing region coding (*spit*) to DVDs.
The defamer was NOT Australian, NOR was the server located in Australia ; so says the Australian High Court:
# Dow Jones has its editorial offices for Barron's, Barron's Online and WSJ.com in the city of New York. Material for publication in Barron's or Barron's Online, once prepared by its author, is transferred to a computer located in the editorial offices in New York city. From there it is transferred either directly to computers at Dow Jones's premises at South Brunswick, New Jersey, or via an intermediate site operated by Dow Jones at Harborside, New Jersey. It is then loaded onto six servers maintained by Dow Jones at its South Brunswick premises.
Gutnick claimed that he was defamed , where it mattered to him, Melbourne Australia.
The Australian High court agreed with him, and said that it had jurisdiction, because the the place of the wrong was Australia.
This is why this is a landmark, precedent setting case for disputes where one party is claiming jurisdiction because of a percieved wrong performed half a world away over the Internet.
The good news for PGA, is that following the principles from this case, Gutnick agreed to limit his claim to damage caused in Australia.
Importantly, in the proceedings before the primary judge the respondent confined his claim to the recovery of damages and the vindication of his reputation in Victoria. He also undertook not to bring proceedings in any other place.
So, if GWTW brings and action in Australia, then they could presumably only claim Australian copyright infringment damages, and not worldwide damages.
I think ! - INAL .. (just a law student)
Dang, that was hard And yes, access denied from a Western Australian ISP.
IPOF gutenberg.net.au blocks access from North America to the Australian ex-copyright materials which might still have a legal millstone around their collective necks in the USA. Same old, same old.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Some corrections:
s/bona-fide/fair dinkum (or the slightly less common "true blue")
s/walkabout/for a wander
s/bang my wallaby/fuck me dead if I'm lying
s/interweb/web (we're not hicks... there is a difference mate)
s/limey outback wanderer from the creek/seppo
s/tinny/beer (pronounced beee-ah)
s/push off/fuck roight off
HTH. =)
Cheers
Stor
"Yeah well there's a lot of stuff that should be, but isn't"
That's about as much as I got from
"Go to CNN [for a] spell-checked, fact-checked summary" -- CmdrTaco
Rather than block, we prefer to use geotargeting from vendors like ip2country on projects where we don't want visitors from certain countries bugging us.
We mainly use it to block African IP blocks. We've had MAJOR problem with nigerian spammers signing up on forums and classifieds and sending their spam to our users using private messaging / blind email functions. Also saves us the hassle of having to read through dumb email solicitations requesting products to be shipped to Lagos.
As to their case against Disney: Peter Pan is currently copyright in the US (where one presumes that the prequel was made) and the EU (where the original work was created), so the only real defence would be a question of timing issues relating to the expiry of the original copyright and extension thereof by EU and US law.
Comprehensive Data havens may not be too far off, eh?
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
he threat is being made because Project Gutenberg of Australia (link not provided)...
Project Gutenberg of Australia
PGoA's libarary
Gone with the Wind
I could go on, but the thing I really want to say is don't reduce law to mathematics, at least not unless you understand a bit about law and the circumstances under which it is reasonable to do so. Failure to do this may result in embarrassingly bad reasoning.
proof, n. A demonstration that a conclusion is implied by certain premises and axioms.
They only have to wait until the free trade agreement kicks in: http://www.dfat.gov.au/trade/negotiations/us_fta/f inal-text/chapter_17.html
It'll put the copyright up to 70 years, and means we have to wait another 15 years.
Eldred is one of the tens of thousands Project Gutenberg volunteers.
Also, if I remember correctly, Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, initiated the case, but stepped down later (I forget why).
From your link:
"28 years + could be renewed for 47 years, now extended by 20 years for a total renewal of 67 years. If not so renewed, now in public domain"
I'm afraid this means that the *extension* lasts for 67 years, for a total copyright term of 67+28=95 years. Gone With The Wind will not become public domain in the US until 2031.
Even without the Disney Copyright Term Extension Act, it would have been copy restricted until 2011.
-- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
Gutnick argued that he was defamed in Australia because of defamatory comments published on a registration-required site.
One of his arguments was that the content should have been restricted so as not to make it available in Australia (and specifically Victoria) where he was located and where his reputation suffered the harm. As Dow Jones had subscription information for people, it was technically possible for them to do so.
Defamation is a peculiar form of law - particularly when it comes to jurisdiction. The jurisdiction arose in the end because publication was deemed to have taken place when people downloaded it rather than when Dow Jones uploaded it, in this instance.
For non-registration required sites it would be much harder to prove. And remember - defamation is different to intellectual property so jurisdictional issues differ too.
Eldred v. Ashcroft started out as Hart v. Reno. To make a long story short, Michael Hart didn't like working with Lawrence Lessig and dropped out of the case, so Eric Eldred stepped up as lead plaintiff. Back then, Eric was pumping a rather large volume of 19th c. American novels through Distributed Proofreaders. Haven't seen much action from his quarter lately, though.
Right now, the CEO of Project Gutenberg is Greg Newby. His response on the gutvol-d discussion list said that they have received letters like this in the past, replied to them, and so far, none have had serious consequences. Though the Margaret Mitchell estate has shown itself to be more litigous than most.