These works have copyrights that fall under the US copyright laws, which at the time of publication originally had a term of 28 years + an optional 28 year extension (which required explicit renewal), and later laws which retroactively extended the term of copyrighted works from 56 years to 75 and then 95 years. Whether the author is alive or dead is immaterial to whether the copyright had been renewed after the original 28 year term. In this particular work of Poul Anderson, the PG volunteer did not realize that the story was under copyright because it was part of a greater work that was properly renewed.

Ankh is wrong about how copyright works across international borders. For example, Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind is public domain in Canada and Australia because she died over 50 years ago, but not in the US because the term is 95 years or UK, where the term is life+70. Australia changed to life+70 a few years back, but anything in the PD when that happened remained in the PD, and since Mitchell's works were in the PD in Australia at the time, they are still in the PD.

PG wasn't intentionally testing the boundaries. The story in question was part of a novel, serialized in a magazine, and the name of the novel didn't match up with the name of the story so they missed that it had been renewed. PG checked with their lawyer, and he said the Bears were correct and the story was in copyright, so PG pulled it, and will be changing their policy on how they determine whether stories in magazines with elapsed copyrights have also elapsed. Most of the stories from science fiction magazines with elapsed copyrights are not parts of novels, they are stand alone short stories, and if their individual copyright was not renewed, they're now in the public domain. I doubt that there are more than a dozen titles in the PG catalog are at risk.

In life+50 countries like Canada, it will be 2024 (it becomes PD Jan 1 of the year after the 50th anniversary of the death), but in the US, since it was copyrighted under the rules in place then, with the extensions (geekoid forgot about the 20 year extension in 1998), the copyright will expire in 2033. In the UK and EU and many other countries where it is life+70, it will be PD in 2044. This is all assuming the terms aren't extended yet again.

Amazon will not be able to price match the ebook against the hard cover when there's a hardcover price war. Wal-Mart, Target and Amazon have been having a price war on best-seller hardcovers lately, in the $7.99-$9.99 range, and MacMillian's CEO has already said that that is too low a price for a new ebook. Given MacMillan's current track record (most ebooks still sell at hardcover price even after the mass market paperback is released), I don't expect MacMillan to drop the price of the ebook to match the discounted hardcover.

There can be two reasons for this, it really does cost more to produce it, or the publisher is evil

In some cases, the print book was created prior to the advent of ebooks, and so it costs about as much to create the ebook master files as it does to create the master files for a new print edition. If the expected number of sales of the ebook is sufficiently less than even a hardback print run, then it's not profitable for the publisher unless they price it up at a trade paperback or hardback prices. Thanks to the tower of eBabel, there's usually at least 3-4 formats the publisher must prep, although if they have good software, that conversion shouldn't be that hard. Even so, as someone who is involved at Distributed Proofreaders, I can tell you that even for a simple novel for which you don't have the original electronic source documents, the amount of time it takes to create the master files (for example, scan the book, OCR it, proofread it, generate XML master) at minimum is probably about 8-10 hours. Even if you freelance this, it's probably going to take a couple thousand to do this. Since our publisher is afraid of copyright infringement, add in the cost of DRM, another couple thousand. Add in Author royalties, the rest of the publisher overhead including profit margin, and the ebook store's markup, it really does cost more than $9.99 to break even if you have projected sales of about 2,000 ebooks.

In other cases, the publisher created an electronic master document from which the hardbound and mass market paperback editions as well as ebook formats are created. The publisher made the ebook available at the same time as the HB, and priced it the same as the HB. Then, when the MMPB came out a year later, the publisher kept the price of the ebook at the HB price. Why? Because the publishers don't like ebooks, they're afraid that ebook sales will cannibalize the print editions, and any cheap prices on ebooks will get the consumer to expect all books to be priced cheaply. You're proof of it, in their eyes.

In MacMillan's PR campaign for their side of the Amazon dispute, they claim that with their agent model, they will release the ebooks at the same time as the initial HB release, price it around the price of a trade paperback, and eventually drop the price to below that of a MMPB, presumably when the MMPB is released. This sounds good until you take a look at MacMillan's track record. Most of their ebooks are currently priced at HB or TPB prices, even though there's a MMPB available, and their TOR/Forge SF/F imprint has almost no ebooks available. If they really do change their ways, great, if not, it won't be any different from now, where I don't buy ebooks from MacMillan because either they're too expensive, or unavailable.

Unless Amazon is the ebook publisher, the ebook is usually available from other ebook stores or the publisher's website. However, Amazon is trying to become the sole distributor, by offering authors 70% royalties if Amazon is their publisher, the list is between $2.99 and $9.99, below the price of any print copies, allows Text To Speech, and various other caveats beneficial to Amazon.

While it is true that MacMillan claims that their model will have dynamic pricing that will drop the price from the $15 starting price eventually down to $6, I don't believe it. If you look at MacMillan ebooks, you'll find most of them are still priced at hardback prices even years after the mass market paperback has been released. For example, consider the backlist Kinsey Millhone mysteries by MacMillan author Sue Grafton (i.e., all but the most recent one that's not yet been released in MMPB). I compared the prices at MacMillan, Barnes & Noble, Sony, Fictionwise, and Books on Board. MacMillan is charging $7.99 for all of the MMPBs, and $14 for all of the ebooks. The other ebook stores are probably the top selling ebook stores after Amazon. There are probably 50 titles between these 4 stores, and about a dozen are at or below the MMPB price, about a dozen are selling for over $20, and the rest are selling for between $10 and $17. Randomly looking at other fiction at MacMillan's website, if they sell an ebook edition, unless it's only been published as a MMPB, the ebook is almost always priced higher than a MMPB.

Second, despite SF and Fantasy readers tending to be early adopters of tech devices like ebook readers, very few of MacMillan's SF/F imprint Tor/Forge are released as ebooks. About 3 years ago, Tor did some experiments with Webscriptions (primarily associated, but not exclusively, with Baen), but Tor's parent company shut it down. In addition, MacMillan's CEO refuses to sell ebooks to libraries http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/21/technology/in-lean-times-e-books-find-a-friend-libraries.html.

I don't doubt that ebook pricing is somewhat broken, and Amazon is part of the problem. Whether MacMillan likes it or not, the average ebook consumer does not value the ebook to be worth the same price as a hardback, and probably not even as much as a MMPB. You can't sell it, you can't get it signed by the author, you can't loan it, etc. When a best seller is getting heavily discounted by online and bricks and mortar retailers alike, it's unreasonable for MacMillan to expect that the ebook consumer should have to pay two to three times the hardback price, but that's exactly what they are trying to achieve by moving to the agency model where the retailer is unable to set its own price. And if MacMillan continues to overprice ebooks as they are presently doing, ebook consumers will stop buying.

If the reports that 90% of all US money has traces of cocaine are accurate, they were probably detaining him under suspicion of drug running.

Apple's new advertising slogan.

Do you have a citation for this? What are the facts of the case? Did the judge explain the ruling? Did the owners of the scans provide the scans under a contract with terms that did not allow republication of the scanned material? There's also such a thing as compilation copyright, so if the defendant copied the entire database instead of one particular document, the ruling may have been that the defendant violated that particular copyright.

IANAL, but Project Gutenberg's rules for source material, which has been vetted by lawyers but probably never been contested in court, allow contributors to use facsimiles of out of copyright material, even if the facsimile publisher claims copyright. In this case, if the Amazon POD book is a facsimile, I think that someone buying the book would be able to scan it and do whatever they want with the scan.

Yes, Disney's guilty of heavy lobbying (unfortunately successful) to extend the term of copyright, but the topic of this slashdot article is companies that falsely claim copyright on their facsimile reproductions of public domain works. Two different things altogether.

Google doesn't try very hard to figure out whether a title is public domain. If there's not something like copyright on the back of the title page, even if there's a clear publication date listed on the title page, it's put into snippet view. When the book is in snippet view, they don't even display the entire title page and the back of the title page, so you usually can't even see enough to try to dispute their classification with them.

Unfortunately Project Gutenberg has no minimum standards for contributions, but many of the recent submissions, especially from Distributed Proofreaders, preserve the page numbers of the original text in the HTML editions.

Australia bumped up their copyright term to life+70 in 2005, so there won't be any new PD works in Australia until 2026. However, Canada's still at life+50, so Project Gutenberg Canada http://www.gutenberg.ca/ potentially has works where the author died in 1958. Also, here in the US, works published up through 1963 which did not get their copyright renewed are in the public domain. PG Australia has been around longer than PG Canada so it has about 10 times the titles of PG Canada, but I think PG Canada may be more active in adding new titles, thanks to Distributed Proofreaders Canada http://www.pgdpcanada.net/.

As a contributor to Project Gutenberg by scanning PD works and proofreading them at Distributed Proofreaders http://www.pgdp.net/, I'd just like to point out that this is not new. Long before the days of public domain scans on the internet, many publishers added a short copyrighted introduction or postscript to a public domain work and then included a copyright notice without indicating that the copyright only covered the original material. Furthermore, while I am not fond of Kessenger Publishing and its ilk, especially if they've used Project Gutenberg content as their source material, they are not obligated to provides free scans of their PD catalog, any more than Penguin, Dover, Barnes & Noble, or any other publisher.