Down in Australia, the local Gutenberg link for Gone with the Wind is–gone. The New York Times has the details.

Jon Noring, the eBook Community list moderator, who inspired the Slashdotting of the TeleRead post about this, correctly worries about the implications for the public domain movement.

Let’s hope that Larry Lessig and the EFF can leap into action and, if it makes sense, get a test case going here–lest greedy estates imperil the cash-strapped public domain movement with threats of suits.

Bad news beyond Gutenberg

Significantly, the U.S. and Aussie Gutenbergs are independent organizations, and yet the Margaret Mitchell estate claimed that the Americans were inducing the Australians to commit infringements. This is bad news for U.S. citizens contemplating public domain archives in countries with shorter copyright terms.

We need shorter copyright terms, yes, not longer ones stretched out by donation-bribed legislators. The Democrats resolutely refused to make this a campaign issue despite my appeals to the respective Kerry and Edwards campaigns. No one would oppose the multibillion-dollar copyright giveway to heirs and corporations–yes, that’s the actual cost over the years of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act signed by Bill Clinton. One of the many reasons why the Dems lost? You bet. A populist stand on on this and other copyright issues could have won over enough voters to make a difference in a barely lost election, given all the tens of millions of file-downloaders. Ohio isn’t exactly teeming with glamorous Hollywood executives with millions to give to the DNC–just schoolchildren in need of educations.

No, copyright isn’t the economy or Iraq. But it does matter, not just in terms of elections but in terms of the democracy we’re fighting for. With material in the public domain, you can quote from it without the risk that still-in-copyright material carries. The electorate can be better informed. Copyright is good, but only with balance–a quality that both the Democrats and the Bushies have missed at most every turn. None other than Hilary Rosen, who recenty left as CEO of the RIAA, has assisted in the rewriting of Iraqi copyright law.

More details from the Times

A few more details from the Times:

At issue is the date when “Gone With the Wind” enters the public domain. In the United States, under an extension of copyright law, “Gone With the Wind” will not enter the public domain until 2031, 95 years after its original publication.

But in Australia, as in a handful of other places, the book was free of copyright restrictions in 1999, 50 years after Mitchell’s death.

The case is one more example of the Internet’s inherent lack of respect for national borders or, from another view, the world’s lack of reckoning for the international nature of the Internet, and it is also an example of the already complicated range of copyright laws.

The issue of national sovereignty over the Internet has not been firmly established, either by trade agreement or by court precedent, some legal experts say, and conflicts continue to be settled individually. But there are much bigger copyright battles looming as more material, including songs by Elvis Presley and the Beatles, approach public domain in countries around the world…

[Thomas D. Selz], the lawyer with the firm that represents the Stephens Mitchell Trusts, said the law firm and the estate were still exploring what action to take in the Australian case.

He said his firm had merely exchanged e-mail messages with Project Gutenberg and was surprised to hear that the “Gone With the Wind” text was no longer accessible. The project’s founder, Michael Stern [Hart], did not reply to e-mail messages requesting comment.

But in a radio interview this year, Col Choat, the coordinator of Project Gutenberg in Australia, said that about 300 books on his site were free of copyright protection in Australia but not in the United States. Among them were Hitler’s “Mein Kampf,” “My Brilliant Career” by Miles Franklin, “1984” by George Orwell and the Sherlock Holmes books by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Those texts were still at www.gutenberg.net.au last week.

“It may be that just the threat of pressure was enough incentive to get it removed,” Mr. Carroll, the California lawyer, said. “Project Gutenberg is made up of volunteers and doesn’t have deep pockets.”

Another reason for the quick removal of the book may be a trade agreement, expected to be ratified by the United States and Australia this year, that would require Australia to enforce a copyright limit of 70 years after the death of the author…

So what are politicians in the U.S. and Australia going to do? Aren’t certain Washington officials supposed to be fretting about a lessening of interest in serious reading? Which comes first–copyright heirs and Hollywood, or schoolchildren and the rest of us?

Related: Needed: An independent Gates Library Foundation. How can the current Gates foundation be a full-strength library advocate–if need be, with a lobbying spin-off–when Microsoft is so often among the copyright zealots? Bill Gates won’t even pay to get the Great Gatsby, said to be his favorite book, on the Net.

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