Book People Archive

Re: The Provinces of the Roman Empire


On Thu, 19 Jan 2006, John Mark Ockerbloom wrote:

> 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.


1.  $2,500 is nothing to the major publishers, less than nothing.

2.  It takes into the six figures range to launch such a lawsuit.

3.  Thus, the State's Atty is unlikely to see any profitability.

4.  I agree with Mr. Ockerbloom that intent is a sticky wicket.

[snip]

> 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.

From what I've heard, Google has been treating nearly everything back to
1864 as being under copyright.




Give the world eBooks in 2006!!!

Michael S. Hart
Founder
Project Gutenberg