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Comment by seven4 | Hacker News Reader

LibriVox recordings are Public Domain in the USA. If you are not in the USA, please verify the copyright status of these works in your own country before downloading, otherwise you may be violating copyright laws.

Is there any easy-access repository that goes over the copyright patchwork for different works around the world? I yearn for the day when we have a more global schema for copyright/distribution rights.

As someone who travels frequently - it does my head in when a subscription content provider geo-blocks something I'm accessing.

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Even if you have general guidance across the varying nations, most of the time you can't expect it to be compatible. In fact, I've run across differing and incompatible copyrights across states within the same nation. I've seen copyright laws that contradict themselves, and the courts reinterpreting that law in seemingly random ways, so understanding the law isn't a guarantee that you can obey it.

As things currently stand even determining who holds a copyright may not always be possible, and the person who holds the copyright may not be aware that they do.

Even just the concept of Public Domain does not exist in all countries, and does not mean the same thing across most countries - there are subtle differences that can lead to insane incompatibilities.

Distribution rights, whilst complicated, are far less complex than the tangled web that is copyright law.

Thanks - this more or less echos what i suspected but never really delved into. It is a touch disheartening - and I don't see who would be incentivised (or even capable of) clarifying/simplifying things.

It’s really problematic. For a specific example, let’s look at Barrie’s Peter and Wendy. It was published in 1911, so is well below the current 1925 barrier in the US. In most countries he falls into the 70-years-after-death PD boundary, and in Mexico with their 90-years-after-death it’s fast approaching the PD date. But in the UK there’s a specific exception built into law that it’ll never go into the public domain: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48/section/301

(I misremembered, it’s actually 100 years in Mexico: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries%27_copyright... )

I agree to put anything I write myself as public domain, so if it isn't a secret, then you can copy it if you want to. I don't like copyright. I don't know if you want to make audio recordings of the stuff I have written, but at least now you know, you are free to do so if you want to do.

(If so, I would request that you make the recordings public domain and Opus format, although this is not required.)

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