Millions of Books Are Secretly in the Public Domain. You Can Download Them Free (vice.com) 85
One secret of the publishing industry is that most American books published before 1964 never extended their copyright, meaning they're in the public domain today. From a report: Prior to 1964, books had a 28-year copyright term. Extending it required authors or publishers to send in a separate form, and lots of people didn't end up doing that. Thanks to the efforts of the New York Public Library, many of those public domain books are now free online. Through the 1970s, the Library of Congress published the Catalog of Copyright Entries, all the registration and renewals of America's books. The Internet Archive has digital copies of these, but computers couldn't read all the information and figuring out which books were public domain, and thus could be uploaded legally, was tedious. The actual, extremely convoluted specifics of why these books are in the public domain are detailed in a post by the New York Public Library, which recently paid to parse the information in the Catalog of Copyright Entries.
In a massive undertaking, the NYPL converted the registration and copyright information into an XML format. Now, the old copyrights are searchable and we know when, and if, they were renewed. Around 80 percent of all the books published from 1923 to 1964 are in the public domain, and lots of people had no idea until now. It amounts to an explosion of new books once lost to the mire of potential copyright claims. And they're all free. The Hathi Trust, a digital library similar to Project Gutenberg, has already uploaded some of the newly freed books.
In a massive undertaking, the NYPL converted the registration and copyright information into an XML format. Now, the old copyrights are searchable and we know when, and if, they were renewed. Around 80 percent of all the books published from 1923 to 1964 are in the public domain, and lots of people had no idea until now. It amounts to an explosion of new books once lost to the mire of potential copyright claims. And they're all free. The Hathi Trust, a digital library similar to Project Gutenberg, has already uploaded some of the newly freed books.
Missing Link: https://www.hathitrust.org/digital_l (Score:5, Informative)
https://www.hathitrust.org/digital_library [hathitrust.org]
Just books ? (Score:2)
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Are you joking? They just passed a law retroactively extending copyright for the audio recordings. [wikipedia.org]
Re:Just books ? (Score:5, Informative)
https://youtu.be/ZuPgXDWMB-Q/ [youtu.be]
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Don't see a reason why you can't s/book for whatever but the preponderance of copyrighted media in and out of the "complex zone" is (are?) likely books. I think it's also likely that copyright holders of non-book media made more effort
Yes (and also no) (Score:5, Informative)
How timely! (Score:2)
Few years back I started a book search and recommendation site (BookDetective.net). At some point, I, or course added links to Project Gutenberg, but originally they had only very old books and only few very popular ones - the classics.
But recently I've seen other sites that started adding download options for much newer, popular books - Chandler, Orwell, etc.
This is a "good think", in my book (sorry about the pun).
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Out of Print (Score:1)
I'd like to see the public domain rules extended to out of print media as well. If there's not a company producing said media any longer, there's no profit to lose. Thus the whole point is rendered ... pointless.
Re:Out of Print (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd like to see the public domain rules extended to out of print media as well. If there's not a company producing said media any longer, there's no profit to lose. Thus the whole point is rendered ... pointless.
Wish that were true.
But it misses the model of "limited edition" - a deliberately quantity controlled art product. They sell for a premium on the aftermarket, and the expectation of that premium makes them sell for a smaller premium from the original publisher and first round retailers.
Change the law in that way and the price craters. So expect opposition.
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They still would sell at a premium. There'd just be a newer print edition that wouldn't. See original book three of Miracleman vs. the recent republished version: The former can set you back over a grand, the latter is about $15.
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>"I'd like to see the public domain rules extended to out of print media as well. If there's not a company producing said media any longer, there's no profit to lose. Thus the whole point is rendered ... pointless."
I agree- to a point (see other replies, which valid about limited editions). I think there should at least be limitations as to how long the copyright owner can refuse to release/sell/provide before they lose their copyright. Perhaps a few years. And not just books... video and music as wel
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Producing physical media can be expensive if not in bulk this is why some books, cd, and dvd just aren't produced. Changing the law would only make them put it in a streaming service or an e-book so they can retain their copyright should something change causing a sudden shift in popularity. It wouldn't necessarily make it free but at least it would become available even if not in the form you hoped for.
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Yeah, that is a good point. It would suck worse if no physical media were ever produced anymore. That might happen, anyway.
"Secretly public domain"??? (Score:2)
From https://botsin.space/@Secretly... [botsin.space]
I think we already knew that King Lear was public domain.
Re: "Secretly public domain"??? (Score:2)
"King Lear", as precisely written by William Shakespeare in his original early-modern English, is public domain. The copyright status of every subsequent *interpretation* of it is less cut & dried.
If I were to write my own interpretation of King Lear using contemporary American English, my own work would enjoy copyright protection. That would NOT give me the exclusive right to King Lear in contemporary American English, the plot, the characters, etc... but if someone BLATANTLY copied my work word-for-wo
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I'm sorry, but WTF! Can't you read?
The copyright lists the author as "Shakespeare, William". I wasn't posting about some re-interpretation of the story. I was posting about the original manuscript.
We all understand that derivative works can have their own copyright. We understand that Disney has copyrights in its interpretation of the "Snow White" story.
Shakespear died a wee bit ago (Score:2)
The copyright lists the author as "Shakespeare, William".
Yes, old Billy is the *author* of King Lear, no matter what *translator* and *editors* comes after him.
I was posting about the original manuscript.
The file date you cite is 1935-07-10.
I doubt that Shakespear, William was still alive by then, and thus it's probably not the original manuscript, but one of the derivative works that can have their own copyright.
Generally not well-known authors (Score:5, Informative)
If you use the Hathi Trust search tool, by default you will get lots of returns for any author name you provide. But if you see “Limited View” or “Limited - Search Only”, it actually means those are NOT available.
If you want an actually useful list of available books, you need to check the box labeled “Full View Only” when searching.
Despite the limitations, this is still useful news. Just don’t expect to be finding Ernest Hemingway or John Steinbeck or Flannery O’Connor.
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Despite the limitations, this is still useful news. Just don’t expect to be finding Ernest Hemingway or John Steinbeck or Flannery O’Connor.
Following one of the other links in the article you find a couple books from authors such as Emily Bronte, Jane Austin, Jack London, H G Wells, Darwin, and Arthur Conan Doyle. But yes, most of them are not particularly well known.
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I think that all pre-1900 authors are in the public domain, even in the US.
Although I’ve paid money for some of them. Several years ago I grabbed a free copy of various Sherlock Holmes stories from Gutenberg, but it was full of annoying OCR errors (which has been my experience with a lot of free e-books. I’d just as soon pay a couple bucks to get something an editor has gone over - some publishers who’ve produced the print versions of popular older books also release good quality digital v
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Unfortunately, their web reader is crap, and the search tool won't let me search only for titles I can download without being a student, so it's largely worthless to me. But maybe I'll see if there's a working downloader.
Someone think of the corporations! (Score:5, Funny)
Joking aside, it's still ridiculous that copyright lasts even this long. A half century is still too long, to say nothing of all the other things that the big media companies will never let fall into the public domain thanks to their political investments.
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We need to return to the Copyright Act of 1790 (Score:5, Informative)
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These laws are back from a time when people were far more "socialist" than today.
Public Libraries? Intellectual Property released to the Public Domain? Sounds like liberal commie brainwashing to a Red Blooded Patriot.
Why should we share knowledge, art, music, culture and enrich the entirety of our country and civilization and at the same time encourage growth and creativity in our individuals and businesses?
That line of thinking leads down the dark path of a country that works for all it's people instead of
Re:We need to return to the Copyright Act of 1790 (Score:5, Insightful)
But then the corporations got involved. Take The Hobbit for example. Published in 1937, by an author who died a little under half a century ago. Can anyone explain how is that still being under copyright protection is encouraging the long deceased author to write more books? Copyright has become a tool for corporations to sit on culture forever and collect a rent check. That's not what it was supposed to be, and isn't what it should be. There's no reason for the terms to be so long except to give a handout to large media corporations.
Unfortunately, I don't expect that will change soon. There's too much money involved, and no politician wants the mouse on their back. Besides that, I think most of the population has forgotten that the public domain is a thing that works used to fall back into, and have gotten used to the status quo so there isn't much political pressure to fix things anyway.
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Can anyone explain how is that still being under copyright protection is encouraging the long deceased author to write more books?
He may be dead, but he still needs to eat. BRAAAINZZZ. And if he has time to clean off his fingers and write, so much the better.
Re:We need to return to the Copyright Act of 1790 (Score:4, Interesting)
And the original copyright could only be renewed by the AUTHOR. The holder of the copyright was just SOL if the author died 13 years after he wrote something....
Free?? (Score:2)
Get out of here with those socialist ideas.
This is how long copyright *should* be.... (Score:2)
Companies that want to control their IP for longer periods can register trademarks to prevent other people from abusing them, but it wouldn't stop the published work itself from becoming public domain.
Combine with Google Books (Score:4, Interesting)
How about we combine this registry of books out of copyright with the Google Books set of scanned books that were not released for fear of copyright infringement for an instant large set of freely available text?
Only in America (Score:5, Informative)
Randall Garrett (Score:5, Informative)
Randall Garret was a science fiction author who wrote a bunch of stuff during the 60's, and some of it is in the public domain.
One of my favorites: the full-length novel Unwise Child [gutenberg.org]. I've read it at least a dozen times and I'm not tired of it yet. Strange things begin to happen around the main character (Michael Raphael Gabriel, known as "Mike the Angel") and then strange turns to dangerous. Who is behind it all, and what is the motive... and does it have anything to do with the first true Artificial Intelligence ever created? Not only does the plot move right along but there's a lot of fun bantering dialog.
Randall Garrett is best known for his Lord Darcy stories. The first of those stories is available: The Eyes Have It [gutenberg.org] This may appear to be fantasy, but the rules for magic are complete enough that magic is essentially an alternate technology. A man is found murdered, so detective Lord Darcy and his forensic sorcerer Master Sean O'Lochlainn investigate.
This one is very short, but memorable. Time Fuze [gutenberg.org]
This one... I just can't say anything about it. Oh, I guess I'll say that the original idea came from legendary SF editor John W. Campbell, Jr. It was published under a pseudonym but it's a Garrett story. Despoilers of the Golden Empire [gutenberg.org]
Republicans will torpedo this (Score:2, Flamebait)
Don't worry, the Republicans will whip up a bill to torpedo this and invalidate the Public Domain status. Just to "protect the profit- errr, I mean "publishers".
Copyright needs to be limited... (Score:4, Interesting)
IMHO, we should have the following limits. No more than 20 years once the ownership of the copyright is held by something other than a single individual who produced the work. So, you get a copyright for your lifetime plus 20 years as an author, but because your estate holds the copyright when you die, the 20 year clock starts. Jointly produced works have a maximum of 20 years as do works produced by companies because the copyright is not held by a single individual producer.
So, you can hold the copyright on a book you wrote for your entire life, and your estate can enforce that copyright for an additional 20 years. A company that produces a movie, can hold the copyright for 20 years. If you choose to sell your book to a company, even fractionally, the copyright is only good for 20 years from the date of the sale. If a two people jointly hold the copyright because they jointly produced the work, they get no more than 20 years.
No extensions, everything passes into the public domain once the copyright expires. And, as soon as the author or producer of the work is dead 20 years, everything becomes public domain.
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A better option would be something like this:
1. All works are implicitly protected by copyright without registration for a period of 18-24 months. So, if you encounter something that might or might not be copyrighted & you can't determine ownership after making a documented, diligent search that satisfied statutory requirements, you'd be legally safe after waiting 18-24 months. This provides protection to works in progress, while nevertheless preventing everything from implicitly ending up in limbo inde
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