all these grey-area hypotheticals… this sounds exactly like a law school class discussion hehehe 
I love law school classes! 
At least…I think I do. I don’t think I’ve ever actually been in one…
In that case, so long as you made a copy of the public-domain book, then you could do so without infringing on copyright.
However, copying the file from textkit and distributing it would be a breach of copyright, even if you own the original book, since Jeff would hold the copyright to the derivative digital work, though not to the original public domain book.
I believe that would be a breach of copyright, at least in most countries (though perhaps not in Korea).
As for right or wrong, that’s another issue entirely.
it is true, but is not the one fraught with the other?
In my opinion this debate is too much on the legal side.
the more important issue here is moral.
<moral rules!>
or as they would say in slang hebrew:
Moral Imperia!
True, people have screwed up the original meaning of the word “rights” almost beyond recognition. Mostly socialists who think that people have the right to all sorts of things that they really don’t. 
But Kalailan seems to be bothered by more than my definition of the word. He seems to be bothered by my distinguishing between moral duties and legal duties at all! I think it’s very important that this be done. We must have social boundaries that people cannot cross, upon threat of force. Those I call “rights”. But we must also have moral boundaries that people get to decide for themselves. If people are not allowed to decide any moral boundaries for themselves, the world would become a politically correct hell.
To get back to files on the Internet, I wouldn’t mirror TextKit PDFs on a separate server because I like Jeff and respect his wishes (i.e. I feel a moral duty to Jeff), even though I don’t think I am legally bound not to mirror them. I might one day mirror the files I screenscraped from Perseus because I don’t feel the same moral duty with respect to them (because they purposely make it a PITA to save those files for reading offline).
Well, no, because my conception of legal rights and duties does not depend on what a particular government says. I am not a legal positivist who believes that it is my legal duty to obey any law a government passes. I am sorta kinda a natural law person (not strictly, because the theory has a lot of problems, but I won’t belabor this point because this thread has gone far enough afield already).
My distinction between legal and moral duties is more like this; I believe I have a legal duty to not steal your car, for instance. That means that if I attempt to do so, others are justified in using force to prevent me from doing so or to take my ill-gotten gains away from me and return them to you. It doesn’t matter whether a government says this is justified or not; it just is.
A moral duty, on the other hand, would be something like giving to charity. I might feel that it is my moral duty to do that. But, since it’s not my legal duty to do that, if somebody forces me to do so, that would be unjust. And again, it doesn’t matter whether a government says it is my legal duty to donate to certain charities or not; it just isn’t.
Wow. This thread has gotten deep. To get back to classics for a sec; I just bought a copy of D’Ooge and Eastman’s Caesar In Gaul, copyright 1918. This book is almost falling apart, and desperately needs to be “saved for posterity” before it completely crumbles into dust. I have a scanner, and scanned in a page or two to test. The pages were saved as rather large PDF files (>100 KB per page), and the yellowing on the pages were saved as gray. How do you TextKit PDF wizards get pages to appear as mostly blank white pages? And how do you smush PDF pages together into a single PDF book? Do you need special software for that?
hi Lex:
I’m still looking for a copy of that book that’s in good condition - they’re
harder to find.
The simplest way to to remove yellowing is to photocopy the file before scanning. This’ll wash out most of the background junk and thus produce an image with better contrast and a much lower file size. Software can do this too, but all the inexpensive ones tend to lighten the text as well and the really expensive stuff runs over 1K - so I just photocopy.
It also sounds like you’re scanning with too high a color scale. The more colors in the scanner the more there will be shades of grey - which adds to file size and doesn’t look as nice. When scannings, scan bitonal color, and export the scan to Tiff type compression 4. Your target file size should be bewteen 10K and 50K depending upon the amount of text and other dark areas in the page.
Your scanner software may or may not have setting like this. Most of the consumer friendly scanners have basic choices and you’ll have to kick around in the options areas to be more selective with your set-up. I’m not even so sure my own flatbad scanner scanner can go as low as bitonal (which I think is 8-bit).
We also move through each and every page digitally erasing the photocoy marks and all other marks that shouldn’t be there - this takes real time to do but it’s worth it. Those automatic speckle and noise removers just don’t do a good job because they tend to remove and lighten the text, especially when it comes to the accent marks.
To create a multipage PDF you need to create a multipage tiff file. That’s the easiest way. The only way I know of creating multipage tiff files from separate tiff files is with document imaging software. There could be some sort of freeware utility out there, but I wouldn’t know of one because I haven’t looked to see what’s out there in quite some time.
Textkit uses quite a bit of document imaging, graphic, and file utility software to bring this all together.
jeff
Thanks for the tips. I’m not sure if my scanner can do TIFF format or bitonal color; I’ll have to check it out.
Is it worth the time to try to scan it, in your opinion, if the book is very badly marked up with pencil and pen, and has a few pages that are so badly frayed that text was lost?
I’ll need to do that also, with D’Ooge Urbis Viri Romae, 1895 which I recently purchased for 1 cent! ($10 shipping but 1 cent!)
Now that is stealing!
My HCP Prose Composition was in a condition comparable to that of a modern book; it smelled ever so slightly old but was amazing for such an old book.
I don’t think it’s worth it if there are excessive markings within the text and not in the margins. Marginal writing is ok because it can easily be removed, but marking on, above and below text is much more difficult. If the markings are throughout the book - I don’t think it’s worth it because it’s just too much work. You’ll have to go through each page with an erasure. Sometimes this’ll tear the pages and it’s very time consuming and messy.
You can get good results if the markings are in pencil and you’re willing to invest the time. The Selections from the Septuagint was very badly marked with handwritten translations above almost everyline of text. I cleaned that out because the book is so difficult to find.
But it’s much easier to keep waiting or pay just a bit more for a book in better condition if you can.
The problem with this distinction is that you say your legal duties have nothing to do with the law (so they aren’t really legal, but need as new word to describe them), instead you say ‘it just is’. Morality is debatable, of course, but are these rights that ‘just are’ also debatable? From what you say I’m not sure if that’s what you think, but it seems so. But how can a right, something that does not physically exist but was created by humans in their minds just somehow ‘be’? The basis of these rights can only be the same as that of morals. They can be discussed and different even from culture to culture.
I know what kind of differentiation you are trying to make. I agree that it is necessary to make a distinction between what you have to do and what you can do, but in you case what you have to do has a moral basis the same as what you can do has. They are just other moral values. Ones are moral values then that must never be disregarded, where as the others are ones each one of use can either follow or disregard just as he please. Is this what you are saying?
Sure. Pretty much everything is debatable. All I was trying to say that that I agree with you that it is not my duty to do (or not do) something just because a government has passed a law saying so. I have my own opinion about what it is my legal duty to do, of course. Other people will have different ones. Suffice it to say that I don’t think it’s my legal duty to not copy and share web site content.
Kinda. My conception of law is that “natural” law (as opposed to “positive” law, which is whatever a particular government happens to come up with) spells out when the use of force is just. (Of course, people disagree about when this is so.) So, if I think it is my legal duty to do (or not do) something, that means that I think others are justified in using force to make me do it (or prevent me from doing it). If, OTOH, I think something is a moral (but not legal) duty, then I think I should do (or not do) it, but that does not make it justified for others to use force to make me do it (or prevent me from doing it). I suppose I would say that legal duties are a subset of moral ones, regarding which the use of force is justified.
This is part of the reply I got from a Perseus webmaster when I suggested disabling copy and print features for copyright protection:
We assert copyright for various reasons: most often it is to protect third party copyright holders who have participated in early parts of the library or to protect the integrity of the Perseus experience and preserve the core of our research, which is not putting texts on line, but studying how people use a digital library system. When someone removes one part of the system, we can’t see how they are using the links we have constructed and it is a research dead-end. But if a user just wants to read Plato, that’s fine. As you point out, the computer screen is not the best place for this, but some people, we understand, cannot afford or do not have access to, texts. That’s a nice thing to provide, but is not our core mission. We wouldn’t be funded if that was what we were all about: we work on linking up our materials, not constructing e-texts. So, the texts you see were a necessary part of the research, building content, but we have moved beyond being a content provider.
We have offered full text downloading in the past and we hope to be able to resume doing so sometime this year for texts which are clearly in the public domain. We have no desire to punish or stop individual users who are printing pages for off-line reading, a perfectly understandable practice. We simply don’t want whole blocks of Perseus materials reappearing elsewhere because it negates the research we do on hypertext and digital libraries, and it will seriously alarm those who hold copyright over portions of our library (which it has in the past). If the latter happens, we may have to remove certain materials, charge subscription fees, or, in the worst case, shut down.
well lex, it seems like i misunderstood you.
now i have, and i have nothing to add to this debate.
Argh, shut down! I hope it never comes to that… I didn’t know the real purpose of perseus was to study online library use, that’s interesting. But when they’ve finished studying, that means they will shut down, doesn’t it? 
Then it’s up to us to find new and creative ways of using it so that they still have something to study, isn’t it.
Or find other sites that provide the texts free.
http://discourse.textkit.com/t/free-ancient-greek-texts/1175/1
Perseus will never shut down. 
I need them too much.
That means we better get all that site content downloaded now, huh? 
Let’s not prompt it’s shutdown, will you?