Book People Archive

Re: The Provinces of the Roman Empire

In theory, purposely posting bogus copyright notices
is a federal crime.  Quoting 17 USC 506(c):

    (c) Fraudulent Copyright Notice. - Any person who, with fraudulent intent,
     places on any article a notice of copyright or words of the same purport
     that such person knows to be false, or who, with fraudulent intent,
     publicly distributes or imports for public distribution any article
     bearing such notice or words that such person knows to be false, shall
     be fined not more than $2,500.

In practice, I'd told this is basically a dead letter, at least for putting
copyright notices on public domain material.  People can't bring
suits on this individually (it's a criminal provision, not a civil one)
and the threshold for proving "fraudulent intent" is pretty high, even if
you could convince a DA somewhere to file charges.

In my opinion, the best revenge against someone trying to claim
copyright on public domain material is to make your own free edition of
the public domain work, and announce and distribute it as far and wide
as you can.

If someone wants to let me know when the _Provinces_ is available online,
I'll be happy to give it an expedited listing.  Note that there are
two volumes in most editions.  If you can't find both of the 1909 original,
I know of at least one facsimile reprint from the 1970s (which quite properly
does not claim copyright) that's in many libraries.

Google Book Search, by the way, did return a bibliographic hit for a volume
of this, but then couldn't show any pages for it.   I'm not sure
if this is an in-process book that's been cataloged but not posted by them,
if they've gotten skittish about Ninth Circuit treatment of non-US
1909-1922 works (see http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/c-fineprint.html
for details) or whether something's odd with their database at the moment.

John