The_Wicked_Flea - Slashdot User

Comment Re:Combating Cyberfraud (Score 2, Informative) 263

by The_Wicked_Flea on Friday June 26, 2009 @02:05PM (#28485871) Attached to: Copyfraud Is Stealing the Public Domain

Congratulations; you've discovered Project Gutenberg.

Technically, you are only bound by Gutenberg's license terms if you leave the license in place. According to their page on licensing, specifically on Public Domain works, it says,--

A Project Gutenberg ebook is made out of two parts: the public domain book and the non public domain Project Gutenberg trademark and license. If you strip the Project Gutenberg license and all references to Project Gutenberg from the ebook, you are left with a public domain ebook. You can do anything you want with that.

So, where exactly does Project Gutenberg come into this "stealing the public domain" thing? No modification to the work has been made save to prefix it with a trademark and license--and without internal changes to the document no further copyright is granted. For the full legalese please see section 1.E of the license.

Copyfraud Is Stealing the Public Domain 263

Posted by kdawson on Friday June 26, 2009 @11:58AM from the uncivil-actions dept.

malkavian writes "This community has complained long and loudly about the very one-sided approach to copyright, and the not-so-slow erosion of the public domain. On top of the corporate lobbying to remove increasingly larger parts of the public domain, there is now an growing pattern whereby works are directly taken from the public domain and effectively stolen by a single company leveraging protections provided under copyright law. The Register's article is based on a paper by Jason Mazzone at the Brooklyn Law School, which starkly details the problems that are now becoming evident as entities grab control over public domain works. The paper proposes some possible solutions, such as amending the Copyright Act. From the abstract: 'Copyright law itself creates strong incentives for copyfraud. The Copyright Act provides for no civil penalty for falsely claiming ownership of public domain materials. There is also no remedy under the Act for individuals who wrongly refrain from legal copying or who make payment for permission to copy something they are in fact entitled to use for free. While falsely claiming copyright is technically a criminal offense under the Act, prosecutions are extremely rare. These circumstances have produced fraud on an untold scale, with millions of works in the public domain deemed copyrighted, and countless dollars paid out every year in licensing fees to make copies that could be made for free.'"

Hitler's Stealth Fighter 582

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday June 24, 2009 @09:36AM from the time-for-a-whole-new-round-of-ww2-games dept.

DesScorp writes "Aviation Week reports on a television special from the National Geographic Channel on what may have been the world's first true stealth fighter, the Horten Ho 229, a wooden design that was to include a layer of carbon material sandwiched in the leading edge to defeat radar. Northrop Grumman, experts at stealth technology from their Tacit Blue and B-2 programs, have built a full-size replica of the airframe and tested it at their desert facilities where they determined that the design was indeed stealthy, and would have been practically invisible to Britain's Chain Home radar system of WWII."

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