Book People Archive

Re: Copyright extension

Joseph Pietro Riolo wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 17 Jul 2001, David Kurz <kurz@[redacted]> wrote:
> > So, it seems to me that if a work is in the public domain in the US (or
> > elsewhere), we are free to put it on the web. Is that a reasonable opinion?
>
> Basically, you would be sued by people in foreign countries where the
> work that you put on your website is still under copyright.

I'm not aware of any cases where this has actually happened, though,
for books whose copyrights have expired in the jurisdiction of the website.

Now, longtime readers of this list may remember when the estate of
one foreign poet did send a threatening letter to the maintainers
of a website here in the US, but they went away after that site's
maintainer showed them that they were only posting poems that
were in the public domain here.

I'm aware of the Dead Sea Scrolls case you mention
(see http://www.bib-arch.org/editors_page/lawsuit.html for a summary
of the outcome, from the defendants) but this doesn't seem to be
quite the same issue, especially since it's not clear to me that
the outcome would have been any different in the US.  Shanks
did at one point file for a declaration that he wasn't infringing
in the US, but dropped this action before it was resolved.  Once
it was established that the modern scroll reconstruction was copyrightable
at all, the US, like Israel, would consider the copyright recent
enough to still be in force.

In the past, I've put on-line works by British authors that have been still
under copyright in the UK (but not in the US), with a disclaimer
that the works may still be copyrighted outside the US.  I haven't
had any problems or complaints about this.  Other sites (like CCEL)
post similar disclaimers, and as far as I know haven't had any troubles.

(And personally, I think that a doctrine that requires any publicly
readable Internet item to comply with the laws of all jurisdictions
around the world would have a major chilling effect. Think of all
the things that could be considered 'disrespectful to the government',
'immodest', etc., in various countries around the world.)

Generally speaking, for The On-Line Books Page, I'll consider books
that are in the public domain in the country from which they're
being served (or that are on-line with permission).  As I describe
in my "okbooks" file, I'd make an exception for "export havens"
with no effective copyright law, but I haven't actually heard of any
relevant servers in such countries.  Since I'm in the US, I also
include a warning about books that I know to be still copyrighted here,
if they're not on-line with permission but are in the public domain
in the country hosting the book.  So far, this seems to be a workable
approach for the index.

John Mark Ockerbloom