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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.'"
This is an extremely unwise move for Project Gutenberg. While I am certainly opposed to the overly-long copyright terms we have today, and somewhat sympathetic to testing the boundaries of the often unclear copyright status of some works, PG is not the group to do it. They are nowhere near funded well enough to risk a legal confrontation with the major publishing houses or their star authors, and by taking that risk, they are endangering the good and unambiguously legal work they have been doing for so many years.
I don't know Greg Bear personally, but I am familiar with his position on copyrights generally, and he has always seemed to me to be one of the more reasonable authors in this area. Even if he's wrong on this point, Project Gutenberg should leave the grey areas for better-suited groups to explore. While it is deplorable that it is often prohibitively expensive to secure justice in the courts even when one is entirely in the right, that's the reality PG has to deal with if it wants to venture into this area, and it should not be done carelessly.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
In my opinion, the span of copyright is far longer than what reason should permit. I don't say this as a consumer, I have produced three albums, all of which I released to the public domain. I feel copyright should maybe last 25 or so years, much less the originator's whole life, plus 70 years.
Hectice, baby, Mercator says hello to you
Since the works in question were first published in the US, by American citizens, the US terms would still apply
The Berne Convention would seem to only require 50 years protection or the length in the country of origin, whichever is the lowest.
I dream of a nation where a man is not judged by his skin color but by an number assigned by a credit rating agency.
Folks at Project Gutenberg are obviously aware of the potential for a lawsuit. They would like to have one, so that the decision on the copyright status of these works is made concrete.
Bruce Perens.
You can blame lobbyists for that, and espicially Disney. There are a few decades-old works that are of immense financial value - the Beatles works, much of Rock-and-Roll music, and the character or Micky Mouse. Whenever these perpetual streams of income near the public domain, their respective copyright holders lobby successfully for an extension, and are willing to spend however much money it takes. Disney mostly, because they own the oldest commercially-important copyrighted work. They build their brand around Micky - they can't afford to lose it.