How to find free copyrighted e-books from Project Gutenberg and elsewhere–legal downloads

Comments:

• bingle says:

  December 13, 2005 at 12:06 pm

  I’ve also noticed that the Australian Project Gutenberg site has things that are still copyrighted in the US… I read copies of 1984 and Animal Farm there that aren’t available on the US Gutenberg site.
• David Rothman says:

  December 13, 2005 at 7:23 pm

  Would that U.S. law let us Yanks legally download the Aussie PG books! What’s more, the Aussies now have lengthened their copyright terms. Luckily books published before then seem to be safe.
• bingle says:

  December 13, 2005 at 9:17 pm

  Hmm, is it actually the case that it’s illegal to import grey-area books like that? I could see a problem with selling or otherwise distributing them in the US, but downloading them to read seems like it should be legal…
• Garson Poole says:

  December 13, 2005 at 9:28 pm

  At the e-book seller Rosetta Books I came across the following blurb that discusses1984: “Orwell’s novel also has the distinction of being, along with Aldous Huxley´s Brave New World, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, Anthony Burgess´s A Clockwork Orange and his own Animal Farm, one of the most important works of anti-utopic fiction produced in this century.”

  This short list of prominent literary works might interest Project Gutenberg aficionados in Australia because apparently there exists an English translation of the Russian novel We by Yevgeny Zamyatin that was published in 1924. This may mean that the work is in the public domain in Australia? When I searched for “Zamyatin” at the Australian Project Gutenberg website I did not find anything. Note, the claim of a 1924 publication date appears in this web page at Wikipedia and elsewhere on the web.
• Branko Collin says:

  December 14, 2005 at 6:53 am

  If http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/zamyatin.htm is anything to go by, “We” was:

  - written in 1921
  - first distributed as a samizdat work in 1924
  - first published in English translation by Gregory Zilboorg in 1924
  - partially published in Russian in the shape of extracts in a magazine for emigrants
  - first published in Russian in the U.S. in 1952 in the US
  - first published in Russian in Russia in 1987

  And Zamyatin died in 1937.

  A lot of bad copyright law has been pushed through in many countries, supposedly in order to “protect” “the poor authors’ widows”. Won’t anybody think of the children?

  So, whether or not We is public domain in any jurisdiction remains to be seen. It would depend on what counts as “first publication” in many of them.

  IANAL.