Some of you may have used Blackmask Online to download various Latin and Greek translations and books will be very saddened to note that legal action has forced their site off-line. (Read about it at http://www.teleread.org/blog/?p=4830 )
It’s a worry when a publisher (Conde Nast in this case) can shut down a site completely because they suddenly decide they “own” the copyright on some old books. I might add that the authors of these books (or their estates) don’t ever get royalties from these big organisations!
Those who live in USA might want to question their local senator about this - otherwise we might find Textkit or Project Gutenberg offline one day!
I’m afraid I don’t really agree with you on this Carola. If someone decided to walk out of your house with your TV under their arm I’m sure you’d want to stop them, even if their purpose was to put it in a homeless shelter for all the poor bums to watch.
It’s a commercial reality that ideas (in their forms) are worth money. If this wasn’t the case, why would any books/cds/etc be published at all? As you (probably) know, copyright does run out at a certain point in time and when it does the books become free to copy.
I’ve only just learned about this, but wasn’t he selling copyrighted material? That’s a big difference from textkit and Project Gutenberg which both go to great lengths to ensure the material they have is in the public domain.
In addition, this quote was apparently written by the creator of that site:
The deal offered was, remove the ebooks, stop printing, no harm done. Just walk away. …
Needless to say, I turned them down. Cold.
Why didn’t he just remove the protected works and keep the rest of his site up (or was the site predominantly these titles)?
Unfortunately I have had first hand experience with the large corporations “owning” copyright. My late husband wrote many songs (I even wrote some myself). They are now reissued and there are no royalties being paid to me or his estate at all. So who is leaving the house with the TV under their arm? And this is legal!
But, why are all the old books on Blackmask also being taken off line? The disputed stuff being published was very old, no-one was doing anything with it, it’s just “dog in the manger” - I don’t want it but I’ll make damn sure you don’t get it. But I hardly think the collection of Dicken’s work came under that category. Or Cicero.
The owner of the site wanted to stop this practice of simply “disappearing” something by squatting on copyright - they were only old adventure stories etc, throw away stuff. So if this is copyright, how come Native American and Australian people can’t sue all the commercial designers who use their traditional designs? Or does the rule only apply to big business?
I quite frankly never read any of the old pulp fiction stuff, I probably never will. The day I see the original authors getting some money out of it I will support their rights 100%. But, like many of the older musicians etc, they will never see a cent.
Are you suggesting the original authors wrote these pieces out of the goodness of their hearts and for no financial compensation at all donated them to the publisher? I suspect they instead made a deal – probably getting more money up front for agreeing to give away future royalties. Business can be ugly, I agree, but if the authors are not getting any royalties it must be because of terms they or their heirs at one time agreed to (presumably in writing), right? If not, they would have their own legal recourse.