Following Len Edgerly’s podcast last week of his interview with “Starbuck,” the Kindle-toting Army Captain serving in Iraq, I thought I would grab a copy of a book he recommended during the interview, T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom. I mean, the book was written a looong time ago so I figured that Project Gutenberg would be able to set me up with a copy I could easily transfer to my Kindle.
To my surprise, I discovered that doing so, might very well be illegal.
My consternation comes from the fact that the book is freely available over the Internet from Gutenberg — Gutenberg of Austalia, that is. It seems that the copyright on this recommended book ran out a while ago in other (and what I consider like-minded) parts of the world, such as the UK. And there sits the file, like that big, juicy goose in the window of the Poultry Shop to which Tiny Tim has hopelessly pressed his nose. These files are even linked on American servers, surrounded by ominous sounding messages like: “Warning! Restricted Access!” (in a very large font size, no less). I am truly the child in the toy store, and may look, but not touch.
To further complicate matters, I notice that Seven Pillars of Wisdom was originally published in 1922 (the so-called “1922 Edition” or the “Oxford Text” of Seven Pillars). Heck, one of the tags for this book at Wikipedia is “Books of 1922.” Next, when I look at a very authoritative-seeming site at Cornell University that charts out when certain kinds of works enter the public domain, I read that works by foreign authors published in foreign countries “Before 1923″ are to be considered “In the public domain” in the U.S.
So what gives?
Perhaps one of you EduKindlers can help with a comment clarifying the status of Seven Pillars for us all. Until then, I will just keep my nose pressed against the barrier beyond which I can see that plump Seven Pillars file, tempting me grievously to grab it and run.
[Note: in exploring this issue a bit further, I was surprised to find two different versions of the book in Kindle versions at the Kindle Store, both for the kind of low price that one would expect from a publisher who has taken a public domain text, formatted it for the Kindle, and put up for sale through the Amazon Digital Text Platform. Perhaps someone can 'splain this phenomenon to me as well... HELP!!!]
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My guess is that, similar to the iPod and iTunes strategy, the Kindle and the e-book content is designed to generate increased sales for Amazon.com – beyond any secondary role it plays in other aspects of book culture. To that end, it would make sense to have users purchase content through Amazon.com rather than other sources. The issue may also be a technical matter of interoperability – whether purposeful or not. In this latter case I suppose you can try to subvert the Kindle strategy by finding a way to load ‘unauthorized’ e-content on to the reader, or, as you have pointed out, see a business opportunity in the platform by creating a value (reformatting public domain content) and generate some revenue through Amazon.com.
Well when was it published IN THE U.S.? Under the 1909 copyright act, the clock didn’t start ticking until a work was published in the U.S., so it’s possible that if it’s American date of publication was 1923, it would still be coverd by copyright. Unlike the EU, there is no “lesser terms” clause under U.S. copyright law, so just because a book enters the public domain in it’s country of origin does not mean that it isn’t covered by copyright here.