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.

Wind projects occupy anywhere from 28 to 83 acres per megawatt, depending on local terrain, but only 2 to 5 percent of the project area is needed for turbine foundations, roads or other infrastructure. -- American Wind Energy Association

Heh, a recycled *BSD is dying post from 2002 should be moderated funny, not troll.

The copyright term discussed in FTA is for performances/recordings, was 50 years, period, and will now be 70 years, period, death of performer has nothing to do with it. Copyright for songwriter/composer was, and still is life+70, and hasn't changed.

In general, this benefits the average performer by a few euros a year, but cumulatively adds up to a much larger amount to the companies with large copyright holdings.

Feel free to mod the parent down, postings that are flat out wrong because the poster clearly did not RTFA shouldn't be Insightful/5.

If the US ever ratifies this, George Foreman will be in big trouble:

The Convention acknowledges that every child has certain basic rights, including the right to life, his or her own name and identity, to be raised by his or her parents within a family or cultural grouping and have a relationship with both parents, even if they are separated.