I would like to know why is Tagore's Gitanjali not suggested by anybody and not found in the list of books? I understand "KHAPCHADA" is a collection of rhymes written with refinement for youths. And there are many be...
As I'm waking up, sometimes I want to collect the details of the dreams I have. Basically I remember a few incongruate details, and in the few minutes of half-asleep phase, my memory is quickly trying to fill the gaps to make something of a connected story from them. I don't even know which parts I dreamed of and which parts I only invented then.
Usually I forget the whole experience within fifteen minutes then, but occasionally the details are memorable enough that I still remember during the day. In the latter case, they seem like one of those story-id questions on Sci Fi SE, with intrigueing details that should be enough to uniquely identify the story, but there never was a story, so the question can't be answered.
A few of these even leave lasting memories for years later, usually because they were such terrifying nightmares during the dream or as I wake up, but in one case because it became more scary the more I thought about it later.
Today's dream was about my mother trying to get vengeance on a teacher. She was using a complicated plan that she has been secretly designing and training for for thirty years, unknown to everyone including me, despite me being involved in the plan. My mother was thinking of this ever since the teacher slighted her back then, thirty years ago, but she quickly found out that the teacher was magical, with more powers than hers, and out of her league, so she spent all those years training.
Whoa, the copy of book appearing on MEK, supposedly licensed under a free copyright license, but almost certainly illegally, without knowledge of the heirs of the original author. I'm surprised, MEK is usually better than this. Either that, or all the other books are there under false permissions too, it just wasn't so obvious.
It was apparently uploaded to MEK in 2017, presumably because the translator is Szerb Antal who died in 1945, but the original book should be still under copyright because it was published in the U.S.
Ok wait let me look up how copyright in the U.S. works again, because it's complicated and now I'm not sure about what I said.
Well, it's from those dates where the originals are protected by copyright if they were registered and the copyright was renewed, but since the originals are famous enough and not on Project Gutenberg or Wikisource yet, I must assume that that's the case.
Ah heck. library.stanford.edu/collections/copyright-renewal-database "Renewals received by the Copyright Office after 1977 are searchable in an online database, but renewals received between 1950 and 1977 were announced and distributed only in a semi-annual print publication. The Copyright Office does not have a machine-searchable source for this renewal information, and the only public access is through the card catalog in their DC offices." Great. So maybe it's not known.
"Victoria doesn't know this, but on those very rare occasions that she does something I find irritating, I get my own back by sneaking upstairs and and moving her bookmarks." David Mitchell. True or a lie?
@Randal'Thor 'why doesn't Britain have earthquakes' earthquakes.bgs.ac.uk/earthquakes/recent_uk_events.html My partner was within the area the Glenelg one could be felt on the 23rd September. It physically shook his house and the noise was so loud he initially thought his garage had collapsed and then that there must have been a rockfall in the mountain above his house. We might not get big quakes, but smaller ones happen all the time.
@EddieKal (1) I don't think that's relevant for this case, of sharing an entire book on MEK; (2) those details of US copyright law are irrelevant here in Europe, the local law is what determines the exceptions, US law only comes in because it determines the length of the copyright protection term since the original book was first published in the US
@NorthLæraðr Again, 70 years after the author's death is the term in (most of) Europe, that's why the translator's copyright doesn't get most of the protections, but the original book was published in the US, which has a different term, 95 years after publication in this case, which definitely hasn't expired for this book.
@EddieKal Well, you live in the US and moderate SE, so the US copyright laws matter for you because of those.
@b_jonas Yeah you are right sharing the entire book is a different beast. What I was saying is if people quote some passages from a book and the book is under copyright protection, it could still be considered fair use. I don't know what MEK is.
Works first published in the U.S. are of course under the jurisdiction of local laws in other countries but a lot of international treaties and rules are what mandate local laws
@EddieKal MEK is the website mek.niif.hu (or the mirror mek.oszk.hu ) which distributes all kinds of books
@EddieKal Yes, those are what tell how to determine the length of the copyright protection so it's ideally the same everywhere for any one work. They don't mandate the details of the exceptions, which are quite different in every country.
@EddieKal The cases when you can copy (part of) a work that is protected by copyright and the term hasn't expired, such as the fair use rules in the US.
That's what like a third of the copyright law is concerned with, and the most important part for us ordinary people.
@b_jonas Ah I see what you mean. I mentioned "fair use" earlier in reference to works in the U.S. but I am of course less familiar with European laws. I thought in the EU exceptions as you describe and any chance at applying the fair use doctrine had been killed off by the 2019 EU Directive.
My favorite part is where it basically says, "Ok, so these are the rule numbers for all the exceptions scattered throughout this law that may allow you to copy parts of a work without a license when the copyright term for the work is active. You are not allowed to copy an entire book, only parts, no matter what those rules say, except (1) in handwriting, or (2) under the exception for libraries serving visually impaired people."
That's my rephrasing, not the actual text. And I'm still not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.
@EddieKal I don't think the exceptions are detailed by EU laws either, they're in the per-country laws.
That's probably to simplify cases, because if you do make illegal copies of a copyrighted work, but you claim that you fall under one of those exceptions, it can be difficult to prove that you don't, especially before you sell all the copies and hide the profit, but whether you copied the whole book or just chapters is easier to decide and more objective.
The handwriting clause is probably for the kind of art or architecture students that go into museums, set up a painting easel (stand) and canvas, and spend hours copying some masterwork painting. Nobody copies books only in handwriting if they want to sell illegal copies, they copy with typewriter, photography, microfilm, etc.
