Book People Archive

Re: copyright

> I suspect that this is an old question. Perhaps I missed it. There are 
> people on the web who are publishing out-of-copyright works to the web who 
> 

Jeff and Paulina,

I have taken a stand against this particular interpretation of copyright law. 
If I find a text that, by law, is in the public domain I don't hesitate to 
extract the entire textual portion of it, removing any markup and replacing 
it with markup of my own that I do NOT claim copyright of, and put it up on 
my eTextCollective site at 

http://members.nbci.com/etcollective/

It doesn't matter what rights you claim to the modifications, the expression 
in words and punctuation of the original book are what belongs to the public. 
New font, illustrations, markup be damned, "Call me Ishmael." is now and will 
always be the first public domain sentence in the first chapter of a public 
domain novel.

Jim Weiler
The Naked Word

I should also announce to the bookpeople that The Naked Word, the website at 
www.nakedword.org will, effective May, which means now, no longer offer free 
unlimited access to the public domain content we have offered for so long. We 
can no longer afford to subsidize the hosting.

All existing content has been copied to the eTextCollective site, still 
providing free access at

http://members.nbci.com/etcollective/

I'm afraid that means new links for every title. And they're long, complex 
names the likes of 
"-w_appleton-c-s_victor-t_tom-s_swift-sand-s_his-s_motor-hcycle.html"

Sorry for the inconvenience, you guys who are maintaining indices, but the 
site has been sucking my pocketbook dry so I'm calling it quits.
             
Jim