[cc-community] Finding PD content on Gutenberg

Terry Hancock hancock at anansispaceworks.com
Mon Feb 11 09:01:27 EST 2008


Chris Watkins wrote:
> I've discovered that Gutenberg.org includes material marked as copyrighted.
> So, as part of Appropedia's Public Domain
> Search<http://www.appropedia.org/Appropedia%27s_Public_Domain_Search>,
> I need a filtered search of Gutenberg.org.

What you might be running into is the fact that Gutenberg.org website
content is under a standard "all rights reserved" license and the file
header information is under a "verbatim copies only" license.  Only the
contained public domain work is actually public domain material.

So, Gutenberg contains George MacDonald's "Princess and Curdie", which
is PD. But the header data at the top of the file that says "This is a
Project Gutenberg e-text... [blah blah blah]" is copyright Project
Gutenberg and therefore NOT PD (and therefore so is the entire file if
left as-is).  In order to get the PD work, you have to strip out all of
the Project Gutenberg stuff at the beginning.

Cheers,
Terry

-- 
Terry Hancock (hancock at AnansiSpaceworks.com)
Anansi Spaceworks http://www.AnansiSpaceworks.com



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