TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Are they going to stop selling hard copies of public domain books, then?

Your argument has nothing to do with public domain books, and everything to do with small publishers.

What’s the difference to Amazon between a small publisher claiming that a book is public domain when it isn’t, and a small publisher claiming it has a licence to an in-copyright book when it doesn’t?

It seems to me that what you are suggesting is that Amazon should stop selling ebooks from any small publisher in order to avoid any possible liability.

@Paul: Although a good argument, there is a fallacy — Amazon currently has no way to know whether any book is violating someone’s copyright and third-party indemnification agreements are only as good as the pockets are deep (how valuable is such an agreement from Harcourt which is on the verge of bankruptcy?).

Amazon assumes that Knopf Doubleday has the right to distribute Dan Brown’s latest novel as an ebook, but unless it vets the contract between Brown and Knopf, it really doesn’t know.

Granted that there is less risk because Brown would be screaming bloody murder, but Amazon is still taking a risk with lesser-known authors. Granted I haven’t practiced copyright law in a number of years so things may be different today and in the ebook world, but I don’t think Amazon’s exposure is any greater on a public domain book provided by Random House than one provided by Jerk Jones Press. And as with most every other thing, I suspect that Amazon could insulate itself fairly well. One easy way is to require the posting of a bond that is tied to expected sales or to require a quarantine period where a book is available to publishing competitors for a 60-day period to challenge — and provide proof — whether a book violates their copyright. Kind of like an affirmative defense.

A decent lawyer should be able to come up with a number of ways to minimize Amazon’s exposure without simply cutting off the head.

Though I’m not a lawyer, I have studied copyright law a little bit.

Amazon is doing a lot right and a lot wrong. As they have stated their intentions, it is out of consumer interest that they slow down/halt the production of these PD texts. Is it the best of the best interests for the customer to let them go through a million copies of what’s basically the same file to find the one that they really need? Is it fair for the consumer to think that a copy that’s priced at $4.99 is better than the $0.99 copy when, most likely, they came from the same Project Gutenberg file and took less than a minute to go from the start of the project to the final product? The point of all this is to cut down on all of that. They are already offering their free version, do we *really* need a million more copies in addition?

This is decision is *not* new. It was just poorly enforced until recently. In fact, I remember when I was looking up all the rules and regulations that Amazon had for the Kindle publishing; there was a line that stated that they weren’t going to accept multiple copies of the same Public Domain files and, if you did, chances are it would be deleted. It was put in as a first come, first serve basis.

To answer the question about the copyrights of copyrighted public domain texts, that is already laid out within the US copyright laws. That would mean significant changes (i.e. Pride & Prejudice & Zombies), quote books (where what is being copyrighted is more of the arrangement than the actual text), or original introductions and annotations. All works of this nature should be legally copyrighted before sending it to the Kindle for publishing globally. So, the simple answer would be to provide proof of copyright ownership.

How to figure out what’s in copyright? Not too hard for the most part. Just use a database of acceptable PD books. Simple for books before the 1920s, but can get a bit difficult for books post-1920s where full lists of books that have fallen out of copyright are not available without research. This would mostly apply to books that weren’t renewed by the author/publisher/estate or didn’t have a copyright notice printed during the time media was required to have the notice to stay in copyright. Creative Commons, I’m sure, also causes a bit of strain in finding out what’s acceptable.

As for checking of content, have a simple solution that many teachers use today to combat plagiarism — file submitted, file compared with all available resources to find out how much of a paper is verbatim from another source. A legitimate copy should be as close to 100% as possible.

It’s a sticky situation all around to let everything go for so long and then suddenly start enforcing your rules out of nowhere. And now they have put themselves into a position where instead of first come, first served, it’s a decision of, how do they judge what’s the better versions to keep?

Copyright probably plays a major role in it, but it’s one that could have been avoided for the most part. A book like 1984 isn’t so obscure that they should need to do a lot of research to find its US copyright status.

Amazon is not much different than the on-demand publishers in their decision. They’ve been going through the same problems for years. It would probably be best for them if they took advice from those companies.

It strikes me that Paul’s arguments (as others have noted) apply to a lot more than simply public domain books. All small publishers, yes; and all publishers who don’t have an ongoing proven relationship with Amazon, would fall under this shadow.

The very nature of the automated self-serve DTP side of Amazon Kindle editions opens the company up to all the dangers Paul enumerates.

But what are the potential good things Amazon might gain that could overbalance these risks?

By offering DTP services, Amazon becomes a publisher. This is vital for Amazon’s future considerations as it aims to corner the market and establish itself as the North American ebook monopolist.

If Amazon merely offered epub editions that all the big NY publishers put out, and let those publishers set their own cover prices (subject to discounts similar to those Amazon applies to printed/bound books), then Amazon would gain no significant advantage. They would be in the same boat that they are in now, vis a vis the printed/bound book world. That is, they would have the advantage of being big, the biggest — an advantage Amazon had to fight many years, and put out millions and millions of dollars, to achieve; an advantage that is precarious should Microsoft bundle their own epub mechanism in every copy of Windows, or Apple put an epub store in the iTunes or App stores, or Barnes & Noble go after epub bigtime.

The proprietary format, along with the speicalty reader and the subleased cellphone connections, and DTP, allow Amazon to offer more books, and more unique books, than anybody else.

This would presumably include public domain texts published by small fries.

Actually, this issue of ‘customer confusion’ makes little sense to me. Amazon already has a mechanism for book reviews and ratings to help us decide which books and other items we want to buy from Amazon. It helps us decide which edition of the printed and bound King Lear we want to buy, out of the dozens (hundreds?) of those in print.

Just a couple of thoughts here….

Yeah, it is true that suing Project Gutenberg is unlikely to net any major profits for the person doing the suing, however, it seems to me that if there were enough serious issues of copyright violation involved, that it might well have been shutdown by now.

Paula B — Of course this is a copyright issue. It is copyright that determines whether or not something is your Intellectual Property.

Ultimately, all of this shows what a mess the current copyright scheme supported by the Berne Convention is. Unregistered copyrights whose term is undefined, and very vague notions of what can and cannot be copyrighted put the very concept of the public domain in danger. We need much clearer definitions of what can be copyrighted (merely reformatting or presenting in a new format should not entitle one to a new copyright) and fixed terms (I personally believe copyrights should be registered and require reregistration every 10 years with a fee involved).