Gone With the Wind heirs threaten Project Gutenberg

David Rothman writes “Heirs of Margaret Mitchell have threatened the U.S.-based Project Gutenberg and Project Gutenberg of Australia–charging infringement of copyright. The Stephens Mitchell Trusts wants Australian Gutenberg volunteers either to remove Gone With the Wind from their servers or else take steps to prevent downloads in countries where copyright law bans unauthorized distribution of the 1936 classic. More at TeleRead.”

October 27, 2004 by Uncategorized 2

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2 Responses

  1. John says:
    October 27, 2004 at 6:18 am

    Open and shut?
    In the past a US judge refused to accept a foreign jurisdiction’s restrictive rules on information (the Yahoo Nazy case), but I’m not sure how that applies here. A related Slashdot story has some other links.

    Reply
  2. VALIS says:
    October 27, 2004 at 1:12 pm

    Re:Open and shut?
    IANAL, but it would seem at first glance to be the same principle, e.g. “we’re not in your country, so your laws don’t apply, sorry”. However, Australia recently signed a free-trade agreement with the USA, and part of that deal, as I understand it, entails Australia coming into line with US copyright law (meaning e.g. term extensions from life+50 to life+75). So I wouldn’t be surprised if Gutenberg were to lose this one.

    (This very issue was flagged as an objection to the free-trade agreement, with specific reference to Gutenberg, even before it was signed, so it perhaps isn’t a surprise).

    A few other thoughts:

    – there really has to be some kind of international agreement about juridstiction on the ‘net, sooner rather than later. I don’t think any of us like the idea that someone in another country could potentially control or influence what we are able to do under our own laws.

    – I wonder how much loss the estate would suffer by having the full-text online. Sure, someone could sit at their screen and read the whole book, but how painful would that be? Printing it out would be more expensive than buying a new copy. I would have thought that the advantage of having texts online was the ability to search (identify quotes quickly and that sort of thing). Are there any regular users of Gutenberg who could comment on that?

    Reply

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