Problems with books in the public domain

We live in a world where great amounts of text, including by many great past authors, are in the public domain and also actually available on the Internet.

I still find myself constantly frustrated. Part of the benefit is removed by (often entirely unnecessary or arbitrary) artificial restrictions. Sometimes, all of it is removed.

For instance:

1. Project Gutenberg, the leading source for several decades, is blocked entirely for German IPs—and has been so for several years.*

   *The reason is a German court decision relating to a small number of books. See a discussion by Project Gutenberg, including the reason for a blanket block.

   Downloading from Project Gutenberg using Tor is not possible either, at least not the last time that I checked.

2. Germany is also otherwise weak, when we look at alternatives like e.g. Wikisource compared to the English, often even Swedish, counter-parts.

   A particular problem is a pseudo-Gutenberg provider, Gutenberg-DE*, which has killed part of the market with a for-profit site and a borderline unusable web-interface. The last time I tried, it did not even work with JavaScript on…

   *I provide no link, because the site does not deserve the traffic.

3. Poor interfaces are not restricted to Gutenberg-DE (or Germany): Many sites that provide free books only work with JavaScript activated and provide no ability to download books for offline reading. Indeed, they often work on the assumption that the website should be used as a virtual eBook reader, one page at a time…

   Not only is this user hostile, but it also severely limits the options for those who do not want to expose their computers to the risks of JavaScript.

4. Even sites that provide better options and an ability to download, however, are often highly limiting through artificial divisions. Even Wikisource usually insists on dividing texts into one chapter per HTML-page. If a book has thirty chapters, they then have to be downloaded individually, be it manually or per script, and then merged into a single document. Even the reader who reads in a browser still has to open all thirty chapters individually…

   True: this might still be less effort than going to a bookstore, even price aside, but why not just allow a download as a single document? It is a one-time effort for the provider (often even less effort than providing more HTML-pages), but it saves effort for reader after reader after reader.

   Many even have a division of one book-page (!) per HTML-page, as with most entries on the Swedish Projekt Runeberg.* The reader might now have to open several hundred links to read a book…

   *Not to be confused with the above item, where the standard is to navigate the book pages per JavaScript in a single HTML page.

5. Often, the best download option is provided by sites that are on the darknet and/or also provide illegal contents, as with The Imperial Library of Trantor*. However, these automatically put the burden of copyright investigation on the downloader, and even the download of a text which is in the public domain in principle can be shady, because the specific edition provided might have further restrictions.** I typically only use these to read something that I could read for free on e.g. Wikisource, but strongly wish to read offline.

   *I provide no link for legal reasons. Also note that it is only (?) accessible through Tor. No part of this text should be seen as an endorsement.

   **I have not investigated the legal situation in detail, but I suspect that e.g. old works with a new foreword or an extensive commentary might be problematic. I would not rule out that even new cover-work could cause problems.

Excursion on varying copyright:
Varying copyright rules between different countries is another complication. This is e.g. the cause of the problems with Project Gutenberg and Germany above, because Project Gutenberg uses U.S. copyright law, while a reader in Germany underlies German law. The reader in the U.S., in turn, might have to be careful when visiting an Australian site. The combination of the often excessive copyright lengths and different laws can lead to absurd situations, e.g. in that a tourist might legally download a book in a visited country but not his home country. If he travels back with it, he would either* break copyright law or force another absurd situation, in that physical travel would overcome the difference in legislation, making this difference the more preposterous. Then again, if he downloads a greater quantity of books during the vacation and is caught in a police raid back home, how is he to prove that the download and “import” was legal?

*I do not know what the typical legal regulation is. A similar situation would apply to physical books, however, which makes me suspect that the second alternative is more common.

Unfortunately, barring an unlikely global harmonization, there are no good solutions. For instance, going by nationality or nation of residence could lead to two people reading the same book next to each other, the one violating copyright law and the other keeping it. Taking the lesser of the copyright durations applying to the reader’s and the website’s respective location might be a way, but this opens the door for “country shopping”—possibly, including countries with next to no copyright protection. Taking the greater duration would keep most of the paradoxes. Etc.

In some cases and some jurisdictions, there might be significantly reduced criteria for downloads (as opposed to uploads) or specific forms of downloads, e.g. streaming. I deliberately ignore this possibility above. (In part, because the research would be enormous; in part, because I consider such restrictions highly dubious. Why would it, e.g., matter whether I watch a video as a stream or do a regular download, watch it once, and then delete the file?)

Disclaimer:
I have not verified that described behaviors and examples are present at the time of writing. Changes for the better might have occurred.

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