I have gone on Gutenberg Australia which is an Australian and due to different copyright laws has books available for free which are not available in the US. Is it legal to read such books on that site?
Of course you’re not breaking copyright laws. If a TV station shows a bootleg copyright of a TV show, does that mean everyone who watched that TV station broke the law? No, it’s the TV station that broke the law.
I was doing a website for someone in Australia and remarkably enough Aussie has some of the strictest laws concerning websites and copyrights. The problem is they are virutally never enforced.
For instance, if you have a message board, it is considered a public forum and as such you are obligated to protect everyone from reading “adult” content. So that is why you usually find a message board in Australia will make you register to even read the contents (in other places you can read but not post if you don’t register).
That way when you register it’s all nice a legal with a disclaimer of age and such.
Now downloading the ebooks rather than reading them online is an entirely different matter.