When you say, foreign, remember that copyright violations are pretty common in the USA too, both by individuals and by organizations. From the perspective of most citizens of this planet, the USA is also a foreign country :-) (and GPL violations happen without regard for national borders, too)

Is is harder to take action against people in other countries. You may have to travel there to appear in a court, in extreme cases, and you may have to demonstrate financial losses as a result of the use of your image.

Many countries give a legal moral right to be identified as the author/creator of a work, and also give the creator ongoing rights to say how the work can be used. This may strengthen the poster's case here, although in the US, using creative commons may be seen as waiving some of those rights. Here in Canada, the rights are inalienable: you can't ever get rid of them, which in principle may not be compatible with some creative comments licenses (and GPL for that matter): there's no "public domain" in the same legal sense as in the USA.

Write a letter in general terms in the first instance - e.g., "I am writing because you are making commercial use of one of my images without permission; who would I contact in this matter?" Be firm but very polite at all times.

If you are prepared to settle for acknowledgment, and perhaps a small payment to compensate you for your time, then when you do get a reply, be polite and accept their offer if it's in the right ballpark, or negotiate for a little more. If the reply is unsatisfactory, immediately seek legal advice from a lawyer who specializes in cross-border/international copyright disputes. They are expensive, but you should get a free consultation that will get you started.

Do not be rude, arrogant, or demanding - not only is it likely to make people act defensively, rather than trying to cooperate with you in finding a friendly ("amicable') solution, but it can also actually weaken your case if you do end up with legal action. Similarly, be terse, don't volunteer information. Saying "I don't have much money, I'm a student" for example is also saying "I can't afford to sue you, you can do what you like!"

Do not attempt to base any sort of argument on the Wikipedia pages on copyright; every time I look at them I find errors (often with people fiercely defending them), and I'm not even a lawyer. Reading the actual copyright acts is difficult without legal training - e.g. knowing that a phrase like "time shall be of the essence" in US law might mean "if you don't make the deadline, all bets are off", or finding a footnote on page 50 that says, "hereafter, and everywhere in this document, the term "Ship" shall mean "Ship or hovercraft", or discovering some other law that amends the one you were reading... and even after reading the law, what matters is how individual judges ("courts") interpret it. Sort of like how different Web browsers react to the syntax errors that riddle most HTML pages - the specification says one thing, people do another, the Web browsers resolve it. Except that judges are human, of course, and consider each case as it happens. This isn't so much a criticism of Wikipedia as a note that, like any other resource, you have to know its strengths and weaknesses. For that matter I've seen official government web pages on copyrights that had serious errors in them (such as giving incorrect figures for duration, and then a while later silently changing them!) so it's all a bit of a minefield.

Careful - there are multilateral agreements that are enacted in the individual countries who signed and ratified the treaties; there's no "international court" or body of "international law." (probably you know this, but many people reading the phrase "international copyright laws" get confused).

In the particular case here it's more than likely an error, and as others have said, contacting Elsevier, will probably result in a satisfactory conclusion. If contacting the people using the image doesn't work, I would urge anyone in this sort of situation to contact a copyright lawyer and make sure they have experience in the area of "conflict of laws" and cross-border copyright issues. In general, it's expensive to take someone to court in a foreign country, and you are likely to be limited in compensation to the amount of money you can demonstrate you have lost.

Well, they're hard to find because they're dark :D

Othe terms include hidden archives, or escrow archives, but see this google search for some pointers.

Since the works in question were first published in the US, by American citizens, the US terms would still apply even if the servers were in New Zealand or Australia. Those countries have copyright agreements with the USA.

Works published jointly in more than one country (jointly usually means within 30 days) usually get the "shortest term" of any of the countries involved, but that's only for works published in multiple counties. Works published (even on the Web) without the permission of the copyright owner do not get a reduced copyright.

In practice, you can often get away with republishing woks because it's too expensive to take legal action, and because you get into an area of law called Conflict of Laws, which is one of the hardest and most expensive areas of law. However, simply moving the servers to another Berne Convention country wouldn't actually help PG very much.

In the past, the US has not tended to honour the copyright agreeents of other counties, but of late that has been changing.

Canada (where I live) also has life + 50 years instead of life + 70 years; it's not actuallyhalf of the US term, though. If you publish a work when you're 20 and you live to be 100, the work gets (100 -20 + 70) = 150 years of protection in the US, and 130 years in Canada.

Personally (and I'm speakingas a published author here too) I'd like a return to 20 or 30 years after publication, with no renewals, But Im not a film or music distribution company, of course!

"should" - either take it up with your representative (congress if you're in the US) or be aware that civil disobedience carries penalties.

At least some of these works are in fact in circulation, by the way. See the original article; there are stories that were first published in magazines and then in books.

60 years isn't actually very long as copyright laws go (sadly) - when I'm researching images or my Web site, http://www.fromoldbooks.org/, I frequently find images over 100 years old that are still in copyright. Sometimes even older.

As for "lost to the world," well, I agree, but note that there are "dark archives" (e.g. at the Library of Congress in the USA) where items are held until such time as copyright expires.

A difficulty with copyright law is that it's the publishers who make the money, and hence have the most representation at governmental levels. I'd guess that with wider representatoin, copyright terms could be simplified and shortened. However, in the US, you also have to remember the Disney Laws. Protectionism and corruption.

| Copyright extends from the time it's written, not published, yes?

No. There are separate rules about unpublished works, and about works first published posthumously, but in general the clock used to start ticking on publication; these days it's usually 70 years after the author died. The Berne Convention mandates 50 years after death, in general, but like most counties the US went a little further.

See http://www.stereopsis.com/flux/ for software that does something like this already (although not with patterns), and can also change the colour temperature of your monitor based on time of day.

There's no reason you couldn't do this with a book from the 1830s; on http://words.fromoldbooks.org/ I have text from 18th century books that have been scanned like this, and on http://www.fromoldbooks.org/ some considerably older books.

IIt turns out that there are interesting old books too, you'll be pleased to know, although the futher back you go, the more likely you are to find a book in Latin. Well, until you get far enough back that scrolls are common, and then Greek and Hebrew/Aramaic are common :D

In an antiquarian book fair I was once offered Etruscan tablets, probably the most seriosuly antiquarian "books" I've seen for sale :-)

Thanks!

There are a lot of historical artifacts in command-names; there was a great paper called A Unix Reader (I think) that talked about some of them, and had, e.g. the very first Bourne Shell manual page, showing how the pipe syntax evolved.

indeed it could be a list of pretty much anything; go to /proc and do ls, and you get a list of processes... go to /dev and you get a list of devices.

I don't think it's really a big deal, I just wanted to take time to explain a bit more about why it was called "ls" rather than the more jargonesque "dir".

Dir is a sensible abbreviation of a word that you’d normally use to describe a list of names? The word you used yourself is "list". However, the function of ls is to list information about one or more files, not to print a directory. For example, ls myfile, prints information about "myfile" regardless of whether it's a filr or directory. So, there's a reason for the name too. The original main file commands, like ls, chdir, dsw, pwd, mkdir, had a pattern to them: the first two consonants for a single word (ls), with an abbreviated second word appended if appropriate, such as mkdir for "make directory", chdir for "change directory", and abbreviations for others, such as dsw (delete from switches, long replaced by rm for remove). Over time some of the commands were shortened further, so that cdir became cd, using the first letters of "change directory." A lot of this need for terseness was because the original Unix interface involved teletype machines, a sort of computer-driven steampunk typewriter, and they were erlatively slow and painful, especially over 110 baud dialup lines (yes, 110, not 110K).

Having said that, by 6th Edition Unix there was a short "quick reference" document that listed the most common commands, and something like that is clearly needed on Linux, to help people find the most important tools. It doesn't matter how well they're named if you can't find them!

I run a Website for images (mostly) and text scanned from old books. When Google books started I thought at first I could just give up, but it turns out that the quality is so low for Google books that http://www.fromoldbooks.org/ and other sites like it continue to perform a valuable service.

I have had to spend a lot of time researching copyright law. I started out believing wikipedia, hah! And there are tons of Web sites with myths about copyright, e.g. that anything published before 1923 anywhere in the world is out of copyright in the US. Did you know that the UK copyright act has an exception specifically for works created in a hovercraft? Or that anonymous works have different copyright terms than ones that are credited, but e.g. if the name of a photographer becomes known (or knowable through any public means) after publication, it gets the longer term? And there's no central registry.

We're all getting screwed out of our heritage when a private corporation can control the world's library. To stop this, copyright law must be made simpler, and there must be online searchable registries. Copyright must eventually be harmonized between all countries, since digital information knows no borders. But it must be harmonized in such a way that some currently cpoyrighted works fall out of copyright, and as few as possible works that are out of copyright are placed back into cpoyright. The difficulty is that in corrupt regimes like the US, companies can pay politicians for their election campaigns, and hence special interests predominate politics. And I have idea how to end that corruption, of course.