Spontaneous ∂erivation

I re-read the Copyright Term Extension Act, and noticed that I missed a few subtleties with regards to works in the 1923 to 1978 range.

Short story:

1. Works copyrighted in 1970 onwards have the same protection as works copyrighted in 1978 onwards.
2. Works copyrighted in 1942 onwards that were renewed have the same protection as works copyrighted in 1978 onwards.

This act removed a large amount of work from the public domain.

Out of curiosity, I looked through Donald Westlake’s bilbiography.

NOTE: THIS IS NOT MEANT TO BE LEGAL COUNSEL UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES.
NOTE: Updated to reflect 1992 auto-renewal act.

This information is now collected on the Quick! (References) page: Is It Under United States Copyright?, which is the most up to date.

Photography: Scurzuzu

Most days I’m filled with desire to import content for my Kindle. Sometimes I think about sharing it with the world, but most times I can’t. It’s the nature of copyright, you see.

I’m not talking about digitizing my library via painfully slow methods (though I am contemplating that); that’s stuff I very obviously can’t share. What I am talking about is text that’s available on the web, but covered by copyright. Despite the fact that it’s up there for all to see without logging in, legally speaking you aren’t allowed to create eBooks and distribute them unless you have permission from the copyright owner. Certain Creative Commons licenses don’t allow this either—if “no derivative work” is allowed, nothing can be done about it; creating an eBook counts as a derivative work. And, given that all content is copyright-protected unless stated otherwise, this is something of a barrier to the would-be eBook creator.

I’m not going to argue against the state of the world, however. People own their content, and they should be able to choose the distribution of that content themselves. Anything else is disrespecting that ownership, and the effort that went into creating it. If someone doesn’t want their stuff as an eBook, even though it’s on the web, that’s their perogative. “It makes no sense!” you may cry. Well, it makes sense if they want to pull that content eventually and sell it—and yes, the Internet Archive respects robots.txt. That their work lives on in your browser cache doesn’t mean it lives on everybody else’s.

So. Now that that’s cleared out of the way.

At the moment, I can easily create eBooks from web content. I have scripts tailored for particular websites that strip away extraneous HTML, educate quotes and other punctuation, create clickable tables of content, aggregate even hundreds of entries into a single collection. There are more problems with efficiently digesting PDFs, but I already have scripts that will take care of the hard page breaks you find while converting a PDF document.

It’s perfectly legal for me to create eBooks for myself and my Kindle. It’s not legal to distribute them, in that form, for everybody else. This frustrates me, but all the same, I do respect the whys behind the restrictions.

The knowledge of how to do make eBooks from this content, though—that can be distributed. And it already has been on the web to some extent.

It’s a difficult business—almost every particular story needs its own care with certain aspects, even stories hosted on the same site; not only do you have non-standard HTML and, in some cases, extremely broken HTML to deal with, you also have specific formatting to deal with, and any of these can be inconsistent through the text. You have text that’s split onto different pages; you may have 300+ entries to deal with, with slightly different formatting constraints applied over five years. There’s no one-size-fits-all to chomp every HTML page into decent eBooks of quality—though there are scripts that will let you do it easily at bad quality.

I’m on the good quality side, obviously. Some people will say it doesn’t really matter, and in a sense, it doesn’t. Words are words. On the other hand, there’s something to be said for tables of contents, text that reflows properly, paragraphs that aren’t broken inappropriately, italics that are applied, spacing that depends on context… these little things have plagued type setters for hundreds of years, and it’s not about to stop just because the digital age is here. When I turn text into eBooks, I also study the visual formatting of the original source so I can replicate it as best I can.

I’m also on the side of preparing good quality quickly. This requires scripting knowledge, usually perl in my case; HTML and CSS knowledge (not huge amounts, but beyond simple websites); knowledge of wget or curl to quickly download and sanitize references for parts of websites; and knowledge of the ins and outs of extremely powerful text editors, like Vim, that pretty much qualify as on-the-fly scripting. And also the wisdom to know when you have to do something manually—although even that can be sped up with the right knowledge of the right tools. Someone commented on how many good eBooks I’ve done in what can be thought of as a short period of time; I often forget this, because the speed is now natural for me. And maybe there is some distinction here, since what I can offer up for download is dwarfed by what I make for myself.

The world online is my oyster. I just can’t share most of it with you all. This is not something I would do just because I can, legally or not; even for Creative Commons works that allow derivative work, I still ask for permission for distribution, and even so I hand over control of distribution to them if they want it. It’s enough that works can get out there legally at all for Kindles worldwide.

Okay, there’s been a lot of FAIL on the interwebs lately, and the most recent one is the hubbub about the Rowling and Vander Ark case. A lot of people think Rowling’s being a big meanie. What I want to say about that I’ll keep under wraps, because I think there’s been more misleading articles than not in the media.

Right now I’ll just say: it’s a shame that, while Stanford Law seems unable to read court documents, especially the ones from the history of the case—you know, why read what’s been going on when you pass judgment in public or something [/sarcasm]—fandom_wank, as a collective entity, can.¹

For people who may be wondering about the “Pie Chart of Doom”, it’s a breakdown, in graphical form, of the amount of text that’s been plagiarized by Vander Ark’s book from the Harry Potter books versus other kinds of text. It’s also available in bar graph form. For larger images, clicky to embiggen:

pics extracted from documents by B.K. DeLong

It may be a surprise to some, but it’s not only professional writers who live on LiveJournal; there are professional lawyers as well. Thankfully they’re less obtuse on LJ, and tend to break down testimonies and documents into easily digestible forms for the layman:

• praetorianguard covers the circus that the case became, and also highlights from the trial.
• praetorianguard explains why settling is good and why the defendant’s attorneys are awful; if only RDR had a dream team I suppose.²
• Not on LJ, but Dan Slater covers the following: RDR refuses to settle. And of course, Steven Vander Ark, no matter what he wishes he could do, is along for the ride.
• foresthouse breaks down the ruling, starting with Part I: Findings of Fact.
• foresthouse continues ruling breakdown: Part II: Conclusions of Law, Copyright Infringement.
• Update: foresthouse continues with: Part III: Conclusions of Law, Derivative Work. (Also lists more links to ruminations, past and present, on the case.)
• Update: foresthouse continues with: Part IV: Conclusions of Law, Fair Use; Part V, Damages and Conclusion
• Update: praetorianguard breaks down the ruling as well.
• And Scrivener’s Error, not on LJ but on Blogger, weighs in.
• Update: At Harvard’s Info/Law blog, Derek Bambauer speaks.

And finally, Nora Roberts, who tends to be a clueful and reader/fandom-with-it author (along with Diane Duane) comments curtly here.

For those who wonder what would have happened if RDR won: it would have been the worst thing possible for fandom. The ruling would prod studios, lawyers for authors, and other copyright holders to crack down on fan fiction and other fan creations; while they’ve always been looked at with a wary and willingly ignoring eye before, now they would actually pose a legal threat due to precedent set by Rowling vs. RDR Books. We’d start seeing fanfiction sites get shut down left and right, in other words.

So digest before you judge and shout.

(By the way, for folks who might wonder where I was yesterday, since the 8th (sob!) is without a blog post: on Twitter, mostly, since I was traveling to and from a doctor’s appointment and then to and from the pharmacy, which took its sweet time in preparing some of the stuff.)

1. For those who don’t remember Orson Scott Card’s opinion: he thought Rowling was wrong. These days, being on the same side as OSC tends to be a strong indicator of being on the wrong side. [↩]
2. Another point for those just coming in: Vander Ark is not the defendant. His publisher, RDR Books, is. [↩]

When I wanted to suddenly dive into Jeeves and Wooster after nearly 10 years (damn you, Charles Stross!), the first place I looked was Project Gutenberg.

Where there was a suspicious dearth of Jeeves books. Or, indeed, a drought of Wodehouse works in general. Strange, since he was a most productive writer, with over 90 books alone to his name, and many more short stories. And there are so many Jeeves fans in the world, and so many of them are lit geeks—including Isaac Asimov—it’s practically a given that, were it legal, his works would have been scanned and proofed into Project Gutenberg long since its inception in 1989.

Not a good sign for those interested in creating eBooks for public domain Wodehouse works.

Copyright has always been a thorny issue. Not only does the length that copyright holds vary by country, but the ending criteria differ. Even within the same country, copyright laws have changed multiple times.

What does it mean? It means that many of Wodehouse’s works are not public domain in most countries, despite many of said works having been in existence for what most people think is “long enough” for copyright to expire. It also means that which works are public domain and which are not vary by the country you’re currently in.

Some examples of Wodehouseian copyrights in various countries:

• All of Wodehouse’s works are still under copyright in Canada, where (as of this writing) copyright expiration is 50 years after death of author. P. G. Wodehouse died in 1975; the first time any of his works will be public domain in Canada is February 14th, 2025.

  Note that it doesn’t matter what the publication date of the work is; it could have been a pre-1910 short story, and it would still only expire in Canada in 2025.

• All of Wodehouse’s works are still under copyright in the United Kingdom, where (as of this writing) copyright expiration is 70 years after death of author. The first time his works will be public domain in the U.K. is February 14th, 2045.

• Ditto if your country is a member of the European Union.

• Whereas if you live in the Republic of Seychelles, all of Wodehouse’s works have been public domain since Valentine’s Day, 2000—copyright expires a mere 25 years after death of author.

So what about the United States? The answer: it varies.

• Wodehouse’s work published before 1923 has no copyright in the U.S. Which is why My Man Jeeves, published in 1915 in the U.K., is public domain in the U.S. and a very few other countries.

• His other work may or may not still be under a copyright that will not expire until 95 years after its first publication in the U.S.

So what’s the “may or may not” for? That’s because for works published between 1923 and 1977, copyright had to be renewed before expiration. Sometimes people forgot, or perhaps wanted their copyrights to expire in due time rather than padding on more years; only 10% of such copyrights were renewed.

Thanks to the efforts of Project Gutenberg, Distributed Proofreaders, and Stanford University, the Copyright Renewal Database was born. It’s a resource for those of us trying to find books published between 1923 and 1977 that fell into public domain; if your target doesn’t turn up in this database, it’s public domain.

What does the Copyright Renewal Database say for Wodehouse?

Fortunately for public domain, if not for the Wodehouse estate, a few (very very few) Wodehouse books fell through the “cracks” so to speak. This is the reason why Right Ho, Jeeves is public domain in the U.S. while Carry on, Jeeves is not, despite both being published after 1923.

And this is why so little of Wodehouse’s work is present in, or even eligible for, Project Gutenberg.

For the record, I respect copyright. I am happy when copyright protects the work of a living author. I am happy when it covers their funeral costs and bereavement of their surviving relatives. I begin to worry about 25 years after the original creator is dead, though. But that’s just me. If Wodehouse wanted to extend his copyrights, which he apparently did since most of the renewals were in the 1950’s, I have nothing to say against that.

More links and resources:

• Project Gutenberg
• Wodehouse’s work at Project Gutenberg
• Marie Lebert’s article on the history of Project Gutenberg, from which the copyright renewal information above was drawn
• Wikipedia: length of copyrights in various countries, do not depend on this as a conclusive legal resource
• Copyright Renewal Database over at Stanford.edu
• Distributed Proofreaders—it’s easy to join in the effort to preserve written works, in multiple languages, for the world
• U.S. Copyright Office
• Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works—the closest thing to an International Copyright Law
• Brad Templeton’s 10 Big Myths about copyright explained
• Electronic Frontier Foundation’s battle against the DMCA
• Creative Commons—an alternative to copyright for your works
• Cory Doctorow on Creative Commons