Slashdot Mirror
Greg Bear, Others Cry Foul on Project Gutenberg Copyright Call
Nova Express writes "Recently a lot of science fiction stories from the 1950s and 60s (including work from still-living authors like Frederik Pohl and Jack Vance) have been showing up on Project Gutenberg as being in the public domain. However, according to science fiction writer Greg Bear and his wife Astrid Anderson Bear (daughter of Poul Anderson, some of whose works were among those put up), Project Gutenberg has made a mistake: 'After conducting legal research on the LEXIS database of legal cases, decisions, and precedents, we have demonstrated conclusively that PG was making incorrect determinations regarding public domain status in many, many works that originally appeared in magazine form ... In general, Project Gutenberg is doing a tremendous service by making available texts that have truly long since fallen out of copyright, but they are clearly overstepping their original mandate. They are not merely exploiting orphan works, but practicing a wholesale kidnapping of works that are under copyright protection.'"
But, but, my great-grandchildren will be stolen from if copyright is less than life + 99 years!
SSC
new terminology:
music movies - piracy
texts - kidnapping
releasing your own copyrighted material to creative commons or public domain - terrorism
leave it to writers to be creative with language.
That said, if it is not public domain or PG does not control the copyrights, they should remove the material. Leave the wholesale piracy - er, kidnapping - to google books.
More music, fewer hits
Awesome. So you don't mind if I come to your place and take all your stuff for the masses to use?
Sometime in the future, when matter replication is commonplace and law and order has collapsed, there will be roving copy-gangs savagely breaking into houses and duplicating everything inside, storing it in vast warehouses for the masses to replicate for themselves. And replicate the masses certainly shall. Like librarians caught in an animalistic orgy of card-filing.
Can you picture 300 million near-identical Ikea coffee tables all stacked up and filed, hundreds of stories high, indexed and cross-indexed, until they block out the very Sun? Dare you imagine every teenager in America wearing the same brand of jeans at once?
That's the dark future the copy-gangs will create if they're not stopped now.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
You livies hate us deadies!
Go back to Undercity, you!
Any justification for that Rudolf movie?
texts - kidnapping
fanfic - kiddie porn
Greg Bear vs. Pedo Bear?
No left turn unstoned.