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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.'"
>These works have been forgotten about a long time ago. They should have been in public domain since nobody is profiting from them anymore.
That's your opinion, but it's someone else's rights you are talking about. If I said your rights should be abridged (not only copyright, but any rights) how would you respond? I find your tagline most ironic, because it seems you want other people to pick and choose which of your rights should be defended.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Wholesale kidnapping?
Who, exactly, is "kidnapping" the stories in this case? The people who are putting them in a publicly accessible format so that everyone can look at them, or the people who are keeping them behind an iron wall of intellectual property?
I was under the impression that it was the people doing the imprisoning that were generally the kidnappers, not the people granting freedom. Silly me.
Is this all about semantics? I mean, Project G is very clear about this: If a copyright holder makes a claim, they take the material down. I would think putting this stuff out there, rather than letting it rot is hardly a disservice to the authors/publishers.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
They should be in the public domain.
Works that are not in active circulation will likely be forgotten and effectively lost to the world if they are not allowed to transition into the public domain in a timely fashion.
Copyright needs reformation.
I think your rights terminate when you do.
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.
Why don't they host their servers in a country with more reasonable copyright laws? Specifically with regard to copyright duration. Australia and New Zealand have much more reasonable copyright durations than the US. IIRC 50 years instead of almost double that.
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.
But, but, my great-grandchildren will be stolen from if copyright is less than life + 99 years!
SSC
They are not merely exploiting orphan works, but practicing a wholesale kidnapping...
Wow. Hyperbole much?
Seriously, that little tirade is just shy of "won't someone think of the children"...
I have troubles taking any point seriously, regardless of how valid I think it may or may not be, when it's attached to gross, blatant hyperbole of this sort. Make your point in an intelligent manner and people will respond. Make it sound like the sky is falling and doom is eminent and you'll quickly be ignored.
http://cand.pglaf.org/bear-response.txt
"The error occurred because we did not know that Brainwave was a
complete publication of the serial parts of The Escape. We did know
from the publication of The Escape in 1953 that it was the first part
of a serialization, but did not know that Brainwave, from 1954, was
the title of the complete serialization."
United States Copyright extends to the life of the author +70 years (assuming there was proper renewal etc.). Even if the authors immediately dropped dead after writing these stories they haven't entered the public domain yet.
There, fixed that for you.
It's only life+50 years for member countries operating under the Berne Convention, although some works-for-hire have 120 years from creation or 95 years from publication.
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
Correct. For works written before January 1, 1978, copyright extends for an initial term of 28 years and can be renewed for another 67 years. Copyrights that have not been renewed for all works published January 1, 1978 would be public domain. Furthermore, works published before January 1, 1978 had to registered for copyright protection status to be effective; this is not true for works written after January 1, 1978.
What is special about magazines is that many magazines did not register their copyrights for individual articles.
My blog
The theft of the public domain by companies and politicians is the true criminal act.
I hope Project Gutenberg adheres to the letter of the law but doesn't give an inch of generosity to grey areas.
Personally I don't see why the author's death should figure into it at all. A couple of decades from publication to public domain is plenty. If you don't want your thoughts and ideas to enter the public domain then keep them to yourself.
A decade or three of exclusivity is a reasonable incentive to create. Carving out chunks of language and idea space for your own exclusive ownership practically forever is not.
Our shared cultural heritage is far more important that someone's "right" to continue profiting from work they or their ancestors did half a century ago. And if no one is profiting but the works are simply being suppressed because they're out of print but "protected" anyway then that is a crime against humanity.
The rights of the dead should not infringe upon the rights of the living.
Except Project Gutenberg have retracted and admitted their mistake. But do go on, let's not bring facts into this.
Here's my proposal:
Movies, books, TV shows, video games, etc.: 10 years from first publication. No extensions, although a "new and improved version" rerelease is copyrighted separately. This puts plenty into the public domain: Star Trek up to Insurrection, the classic James Bond films, the first few Super Mario Bros. games, and so on. However, it also provides plenty of time to make a profit, and even when something enters the public domain, some people will still buy it (see The Lord of the Rings, the original printing of which is PD in the US due to an oversight)
Genuine inventions: Patent lasts 10 years. Extension can lengthen it by another decade if you are actively using the patent in a product. This cuts down on patent trolls, but otherwise keeps the system as-is.
Software/Method patents: Six months. This is mostly to make it easier to strike down the 20-year patents: it's less of a jump to say "this was patented in the wrong category, and as it has been X years since registration, the patent is no longer valid" than it is to say "this thing should never have been patentable".
Trademarks: Pretty much as now, although I'd make protection of parodies much more explicit
"Casual infringement": If you "steal" something from a P2P site, the most you can be liable for is the most common trade price of the thing, and the prosecution is responsible for court costs. This would make it pointless to sue people for downloading a few albums, but it would still be possible to sue massive-scale "pirates" or even people running torrent sites if they're advertising "pirated" material.
Its a privilege not a right. Copyright is a bad term. Ideas do not belong to the first being to hold them in their mind. Art does not belong to the artist. I'm not going to say some hippie crap like art belongs to everyone, rather I say it doesn't belong to anyone, it just is. You can't own blue, righteous indignation, the smell of napalm, or the force (sorry Lucas). We grant the privilege of profit for a period of time as a robust method of rewarding people for their efforts in proportion to how much people like the results of their mental labor. We made this law in the hope that it would encourage more such effort. The law was broken by PG, probably accidentally, but this is a legal issue, not a moral one, as no one is having their rights violated.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
all your solution will do is create a market for bumping off newly popular writers.
This is the stupidest argument I have ever seen, on any subject.
Let's be honest. Copyrights expire at death, with a minimum term (like 15 years) to support any children. Or how about death + years until any children are over 18.
Frankly, copyright should be original publish date. If it was published in a magazine, then later in book form. Should the copyright be furthered? The music industry has used so-called "re-mastering" to continuously keep works in copyright.
And we all know that when these 70 yr copyrights expire, a law will be passed to extend it to 100 yrs. And then after that - infinitely. But hey, no one will be alive that will remember anything but infinite copyrights.
DISGUSTING....
1) The works aren't exactly making a ton of money or circulation.
2) They got paid when they sold the books for quite some time, why not give that money to their kids?
3) How many jobs keep paying you money after you've died? Why do authors deserve this special privilege?
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.
Berne Convention is only applicable to works that fall under the 1976 Copyright Act. Anything from before falls under the 1909 Copyright Act. If you didn't renew, the work became public domain. It's a Wonderful Life was a forgotten flop until someone figured out that it had fallen into the public domain through non-renewal. The UHF channels picked it up and started showing it since they wouldn't need to pay anyone. Now it's a Christmas classic. Go figure.
Post anonymously - For when your opinion embarrasses even you!
They should have been in public domain since nobody is profiting from them anymore.
There's lots of open source code protected by copyright, but not generating any profit. Should that all go into public domain and not have any copyright protection?
1) The works aren't exactly making a ton of money or circulation.
How would you know? You don't, do you?
2) They got paid when they sold the books for quite some time, why not give that money to their kids?
Who says they haven't? Anyway, why is it up to you to decide what they do with their money?
3) How many jobs keep paying you money after you've died? Why do authors deserve this special privilege?
How about calling it an investment? These are big names who've made it as writers. Do you know how many people are struggling to make a living off writing? Do you know what kind of investment it takes to write a book, putting years of your life into it, and not knowing at all if it will pay off?
---
"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
So 50 years is the minimum; US law goes above and beyond that to 70 years to protect the rich Disney family
Fixed that for you.
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.
The Anderson/Bear folks posted this a couple of places, and it was picked up a few other places. Here is the text of the most recent substantial message I sent them on the topic: http://cand.pglaf.org/bear-response.txt . The group has not provided the author/title (or PG eBook number) of any title they think was wrongly determined to be non-renewed, other than those mentioned in the email. They seem to have some theories about what is eligible for renewal, or who can renew, but these are not contested by Project Gutenberg (in fact, our policy is to NOT to question whether renewals were fully compliant with the law, nor whether a person had the correct standing to renew).
The issue is whether a renewal was made. For The Escape, part 1 was republished with a different title, complete with part 2. Part 1 was not individually renewed, but the newly titled complete work was. We were unaware of the subsequent retitled republication, so did not find the renewal. For the purposes of copyright and renewal, a major outcome of the legal advice we received concerning The Escape is that serialized works are treated as single acts of authorship. Thus, renewal of a part may be considered to apply to the whole -- provided it happens within a reasonable timespan (we have been advised to use +/- four years).
The Project Gutenberg Copyright How-To has details on our procedures, although the Rule 6 how-to there (for non-renewals) is older than the version we used for the original Anderson/Escape non-renewal determination. We are working on a revision that will include additional research for serials, and a few other variations like republication with different titles. The how-to is here: www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:Copyright_How-To
For those who aren't aware, Project Gutenberg is classified in the US as a 501(c)(3) charity, as a library. With over 35,000 published titles, and well over 50,000 unique instances of copyright research (thousands for our Rule 6), it's not surprising that we make occasional errors. To date (I've been doing this aspect of volunteer work for Project Gutenberg since around 1999), we've changed our stance on fewer than 1/2 dozen public domain determinations. Not perfect, but I believe we're doing a good job overall, and have some very solid procedures by copyright experts over the years.
I first initiated our Rule 6 nearly 10 years ago. This was because I saw that of all the books and serials published in the US from 1923-1963 (when renewal was required for copyright to still apply), 85--90% were never renewed. The US Library of Congress does annual reports on this. Statistically, that means there a million or so items from 1923-1964 whose copyright expired after a 28-year term. These items have been in the public domain in the US since 1992 or earlier (1964+28), and many are out of print. As a policy decision, Project Gutenberg decided it was worth the risk of occasionally missing a renewal, to be able to affirmatively identify the many items for which no renewal occurred. I still believe this decision was the right one.
For those who are paying attention to Project Gutenberg news today, there was a story in the Washington Post that, more or less, accused Amazon of abusing their customers by selling public domain Project Gutenberg works, with DRM added, for a fee. The article is here: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fasterforward/2010/11/amazon_charges_kindle_users_fo.html . (I exchanged several emails with the author.) It's a weird coincidence that within the same 24 hour period there is another story that basically accuses Project Gutenberg of stealing.
Enough for now. I'm going back to reading Marusek's "Mind over Ship" (sequel to the excellent "Counting Heads"), one of the hundreds of printed books I purchase every year. Maybe before I shut down for the evening I'll post Doctorow's "Makers"
So you support a 100% Death Tax (a tax on one's estate), so that you can leave nothing to anyone when you die... it all goes to the State.
3) How many jobs keep paying you money after you've died? Why do authors deserve this special privilege?
They abided by the law of the land of the time, and there was no obvious moral conflict with abiding by those laws. We can certainly change the laws for people in the future, but if we want them to uphold those laws, we will have to make sure we honor past agreements.
You've got it completely backwards.
A 100% estate tax would be extremely regressive against the less well-off, quite unfair, and certainly unequal.
In case A, I am wealthy. I have more money than I could spend in 100 lifetimes. My coat tails could extend for generations. Faced with a 100% estate tax, I simply give a large amount of my money to family and friends before I die.
Since I can afford the best lawyers and accountants, I likely end up with close to nothing left of my personal fortune when I die. In fact, I've given everything away and live in a house owned by my children when I die.
Death tax paid as percentage of my total net worth at its peak: roughly 0%.
Case B, I am poor. I have a job, but essentially live paycheck-to-paycheck. What little I have, I'd like to pass down to my children before I die.
But most of the net worth is tied up in my house. I am lucky to have a place to live, but I could never give my house away. The gift taxes would be more than I (or my children) could afford without selling the house first.
When I die, my house goes to the state to be auctioned.
Death tax paid as percentage of my total net worth at its peak: roughly 100%.
How is that fair and equal???????????