NavList:

Renee, I can't swear by it but I would bet a nickel that '66 Bowditch is not in
the public domain. The copyright happens to belong to "We the people" of the
United States, as do all copyrights for US government publications. That means
it is freely available to NON-commercial users who are also US citizens--but it
is not in the public domain. Commercial users and non-US-citizens are not
entitled to make open use of it, as I understand it. That Bowditch is publicly
available on the internet, is another matter. (And a lousy job they did on the
PDF version, too.)

When the US signed the Berne copyright accords (in the 80s?) we joined the rest
of western world on their standard. Anything which does not say "copyright" on
it, still is copyrighted. Nothing is "public domain" unless the author has made
a formal statement to that effect, or the author and their estate have had the
copyright for an incredibly long time. I believe that is now the life of the
author plus 70 years in some cases--in any event, essentially anything printed
post-WW1 must be assumed to be privately copyrighted unless you can prove it
isn't.

Projects like Guttenberg are privately funded, in one way or another. Convincing
any of them to do obscure scholarly texts...Well, you get the petition going,
and I'm sure a numberof us will sign it.<G>


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