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Comment by qwertthrowway | Hacker News Reader

If something is in the public domain, is it still accessible for copying or can companies still profit off of selling public domain material? For example, if I “pirate” a public domain text published by some company, am I in the wrong?

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I had a similar question before reading Moby Dick. I noticed it was being sold online, although inexpensive, which made me wonder. It turned out the English text is in the public domain, and anyone can profit from it. So, why did the publisher charge for it? I wanted to read it in my native language, Polish, and the translation was not in the public domain. Additionally, I wanted to easily upload it to my Kindle, so I also paid for convenience. I know this not fully answers your question, but wanted to share my experience.

>why did the publisher charge for it?

Why not. Easy money.

Very good question! Not an IP lawyer, but I believe the gist of it you may copy the original work, but not any sufficiently transformative derivative work, as that would gain its own copyright. So you could copy the text of a public domain book and re-publish it yourself, yes. You could also sell your copies for $10/ea, just like the publisher you're copying from is doing, or give them away for free, or whatever you like.

The tricky bit is what its "sufficiently transformative" to gets its own copyright. Probably simply text printed in a book is not, so I think you'd be OK scanning and distributing such a book. But if the publisher added new footnotes or illustrations or cover art or a forward, etc, that would still be covered under its own copyright and you would have to remove them. And I could see an argument that a certain printing style (maybe a choice in font or page layout?) could be transformative, but I think that starts to be quite a stretch.

IANAL but I'm told that Feist is probably the relevant US Supreme Court decision. Just because you went to a lot of trouble ("sweat of the brow") to format a book probably doesn't give you a safe copyright--although extensive annotations, illustrations, etc. probably would.

> illustrations or cover art or a forward, etc,

OT, but isn't it called "foreword"? You're the second person in this thread calling it "forward" which means something completely different to me, while "foreword" is basically a literal translation of the word for it in my native language.

Hey, you're right[1]! News to me, hah.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreword

IANAL but my understanding is that public domain material can be published in a copyright protected form, yes. For instance, Beethoven's 5th symphony is in the public domain, but if a publisher starts selling the sheet music for it, then that content itself is still protected. So any contributions they've made such as annotations or formatting, cover art, etc are protected but the underlying content is not.

Yeah, I understand that Dover books might have a copyright on, say, Moby Dick but it's on the forward that they tackled on to Melville's prose, not the story.

You can sell public domain materials all you want. And whenever anyone else copies stuff in the public domain, even if they copy it from your copy, they're not infringing copyright.

But be careful as when someone publishes something public domain they often have things that are not public domain in their version. They can "fix" errors, add artwork, introductions and so on.

Yes, of course, the added content would not be in the public domain. Although it should be note that certain changes such as fixing grammatical errors/proofreading would not be considered copyrightable.

I'm not your lawyer, but if the text is public domain, you can do whatever you want with it. You should be able to walk into a book store, take a photo of every page of Sherlock Holmes, post it on Facebook, and be good legally. You can legally download scans of Jane Austen novels published by Penguin last year.

A publisher would only have a copyrightable claim in their original creative works. So the cover art, the foreword, etc. This would also include e-books, as the specific code for that would be copyrightable illegal to download. Only the words themselves would be free, so you would need someone to create a gratis file therefrom for you.

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