I want to sell copyright expired books on the web.
Some of these books are not expired throughout the world.
That’s the problem.
Okay. I know Gutenburg.net has a lot available for FREE. They use US copyright law, because they consider themselves distributing in the US.
This isn’t uncommon. For instance, Peter Pan is eternally copywritten in the UK, but public domain everywhere else. (The author left the rights to a British hospital for sick children. The house of lords extended the copyright forever. Neat, eh?)
So… Disney can’t export the movie Peter Pan to the UK.
So… I want to sell a copy of a book to someone in the states.
I live, and reside in Canada.
It’s 100% public domain in the US.
It’s 100% NOT Public Domain in Canada.
But… I would be printing it, and shipping it from Canada.
Can I copy the book and ship it immediately to the states?
If the person orders off the web, where is the transaction deemed to take place?
The Server location?
My ISP?
His ISP?
My Credit Card processor?
Everyone who I’ve contacted in a professional capacity has been all to glad to take my money, but backs away when I ask for “Concrete” answers.
I really have no desire to spend beaucoup bucks getting “I don’t know” as an answer!
If any part of your operation (business office, distribution warehouse, computer servers) is located in Canada, you can be sued for copyright violation in Canada.
Interesting, I just checked my copy of Peter Pan and found there is no copyright notice whatsoever in the edition I have even though it’s an illustrated version. Odd.
Does “public domain” allow the publication of an expired copyright book in one Berne Convention country if there’s an an extant copyright in ANOTHER Berne Convention country? I would have thought - intuitively - that it didn’t.
Interesting, I just checked my copy of Peter Pan and found there is no copyright notice whatsoever in the edition I have even though it’s an illustrated version. Odd.
See what I mean? I’ll bet it wasn’t printed/sold in England.
Also Waldoon: Thanks for the reply, but when you think about it, it just makes another “layer” of tweaking.
I could have a dummy corp in the US order a printing house in the US to print and ship a copy to my customer in the US.
ARGH!
The absolute WORST part of this whole thing is that even if I’m 100% right, that still doesn’t absolve me from lawsuits… Anyone can sue anyone over anything.
For any intellectual property, including a book, the author automatically owns copyright over his/her own work. The copyright persists until it is legally expired or the author voluntarily gives it up, when it enters public domain.
Disney can sell their movie of Peter Pan to the UK and they did, and do. They own copyright over their own movie, not the book. To adapt the book for the screen, they would have had to buy the adaptation and exploitation rights unless the story was decreed public domain in their territory. If it is public domain in their territory, they can adapt it all they want and so can anyone else in their territory.
The legal concept you are fishing for here is one of ‘territory’. Every legal entity is based in a legal territory. If you want to sell these books as an individual, then you are the legal entity involved in these trades and your legal territory is wherever you declare yourself to be legally resident. If you want to form a company to do the trading, then there are two legal entities - you the individual, and the company. The company’s legal territory is determined by the location of its registered head office (which you have to declare when you create the company).
Your first requirement is to observe the law regarding copyright in your own territory. The company, likewise, has to respect the law in its own territory. It’s perfectly possible for you (individual) to be in one territory and the company to be based in another.
Provided you satisfy the laws in your own territory, you are free to try and export whatever you want to any country you want, but you may encounter objections from some foreign countries if they think you are infringing their own laws about what they permit, and do not permit, to be imported into their own legal terrirtory.
For example, here in London lots of people take weekend breaks to nearby Amsterdam so they can enjoy smoking pot in cafes legally. But they can’t bring any of the stuff back. And no-one in Amsterdam can set up a mail order marijuana business selling to England because the English government says that’s not allowed.
In any such dispute, the countries concerned can make representation to you to cease and desist your activities, and you can make representation to be allowed to do whatever you want to do. If this kind of dispute arises, it can a long time and a lot of money to sort out, and the lawyers get happy. But your personal or business assets may be frozen while the matter is sorted out.
Ordering off the web, location of server etc. is irrelevant. The first legal test is where you or the company are resident, and whether you are complying with the laws in your own legal territory. If you are in Canada, and Canadian law says book X is copyright and you don’t own that copyright, then you are breaking the law by copying it without permission.
From ianzin - who earns his living writing books and selling them over the web to 30 countries around the world. Ain’t the Straight Dope wonderful?
The Gutenberg Project Australian website specifically warns against reading or downloading books from their site if they are not public domain in your own country, and I noticed that quite a lot of books which are available on the US site aren’t available on the Aussie site.
As far as Peter Pan is concerned, the Berne convention stipulates that if it’s copyrighted in any Berne signatory nations, then it is copyrighted in all of them. Since the book is copyrighted in England, then copyright protection exists everywhere (the U.S. is an odd case, since we’re accept most of Berne but not all of it).
