This is www.e-text.worldwide-library.orgthe e-text control site of theWorldwide-Library organization |
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Copyright mattersIntroductionThe purpose of copyright is to allow writers and other artistic creators to get a fair return on their work, before it goes into the public domain, and over the years the length of time allowed for this to be achieved has been extended in a number of steps. Copyright rules vary from country to country, and within each can be unnecessarily complex. We have tried to put forward an easy to understand explanation for the UK and USA, but other countries may differ. Everywhere in Europe should be the same as the UK, and within the links page of this section you will find links to other country sites. Copyright and the WWLWe can publish anything that is out of copyright, and any item in copyright that we have permission from the copyright holder to use. This could be a license that allows us to use it for a publication, but does not give others the right to use the material from us in other products or ways. The copyright holder could be the author, the descendents of the author or where the work was created by someone as a part of their paid employment the employer who commissioned it. We have a further two sections one for listing copyrights we have obtained ahead of producing the books and a section listing those books where we have been refused a license by the copyright holder to include the book within our library. This information allows you to avoid duplicating effort and annoying people by asking again, and allows you to know what texts we want to get hold of to match up with copyrights obtained. Once we have published the book it will come off this list, but be included within the front of the e-book concerned. We have looked separately at the UK and USA copyright situation, but also within the links section given you many other sources for information on copyright. As project Guttenberg has been coping with this for a long time now, it is particularly worth reading their description on copyright at http://promo.net/pg/vol/pd.html. You will find this also listed on the USA page and on the links page, so you can read this site first. Some items are clearly going to be be available to add to the library now, for example all very old text, so it may be that you don't need to become bogged down in copyright if you find this difficult to follow. On both the UK and USA pages we have given very simple rules that you can use to determine the cut off for older material that is completely safe to use from that which will require some more research. |
The index site for the Worldwide-Library at www.worldwide-library.com it indexes you to all the sites by functionGeneral enquiries general-enquiries @ worldwide-library.org, (no spaces) The worldwide-library is a non profit company limited by guarantee, registered in England no 4369113 |
