Yes, it is public domain. No, you cannot touch it

[Didzis Veinbergs]

When copyright was first invented, nobody had ever heard anything about sound recordings, photography, cinema, or, heaven forbid, computers. Just about the only things you could copy somewhat easily were books. Therefore, books were also just about the only things you needed to copyright — and the only things whose copyright could expire. So it was books that gave us the idea of public domain — at least in the legal sense.
There is no doubt that public domain can be of great benefit for book publishers — that is why they established it in the first place. Indeed, it is a dream come true — you can take extremely popular works that just about anybody has heard about and publish it without paying anything for the copyright. Think about it. You have to promote a young, unknown novelist, and he may want to get paid. You do not have to promote Shakespeare, and he could not care less if he gets paid.
And indeed: publishers do take advantage of this great fact. Many publishing houses publish series of “Popular classics”, “Timeless classics”, “Golden classics”, etc. etc. (What is this thing about gold, anyway? You never hear anything about, say, “Uranium classics”, and the last time I checked uranium was both more expensive and more exclusive than gold. But I digress.) They can make really cheap editions for poor students who have to read Virgil — remember, no copyright costs and a ready market. They can make fancy leather-bound editions for people who want to decorate their houses with some fancy tomes that have big names on them — again, no need to ask permission. They can make easier versions for people who study the language — no need to fight with the author who might have some objections against such mutilation of his work. They can do all sorts of things — and they indeed do.
Now, it is only fair to assume that they would allow others to do the very same things, right? After all, public domain is everybody’s playground, right? Well, you are in for a surprise.
Let us assume I pick up, say, a “Popular classics” book from a major publisher. It is rather cheap, so I happily pay the price and go home to read it. However, at the very beginning I notice a very strange note. The publishers tell me that this book is sold under the condition that I shall not lend it to anybody, hire it out, or resell without asking permission from the publishers. I assume it is their way of saying “Thank you for buying our book.” But I digress again.
Of course, it begs the question: “What on God’s clean earth is that? Are they indeed trying to say that they can do everything they want with that book, and I cannot even lend it to my friends? They can sell a million copies of it, and I cannot resell my only one? Why? And how? How can they claim it? This book is supposed to be in public domain, no?”
If you ever get to ask them, they will kindly answer that the text may be, but the very book you are holding right now definitely is not. Look, they could say, we typeset it, chose a cover, printed it, bound it — is not that worth anything? Besides, you already agreed to our conditions by buying this book. So do not ever dare to lend it — remember, we are watching.
They may be right — technically. However, if you have enjoyed a certain freedom — and benefited from it — it is only fair to allow others to enjoy the very same freedom that you take for granted. Denying it probably is legal — but it definitely is not ethical.
Now, we may brush off the issue as trivial. After all, how can they possibly control if I lend the book to anyone? Well, and what if they could? What if, say, the books were electronic — we might call them e-books to keep things simple, — and you read them on some sort of device — we might call it an e-book reader. What if you could not move the books that are on one e-book reader to another e-book reader — in other words, lend them? It would not be too hard to implement that. Or, to make things even safer — how about an e-book reader that would periodically scan your fingerprints to make sure it is indeed you who is using the device and reading the book?
Sounds familiar? We already have all the necessary technology — e-book readers, DRM, fingerprint scanners. We just need to put it together. Or not.
Whatever we decide, odds are this will be the future of reading. So we better think twice.

[Andrius Kulikauskas]

Didzis, this is excellent! So I will sign you up as one of our debates. Also, we need to find somebody for you to debate. I will ask us to look in Vilnius for a publisher of classic books. Perhaps you might even come to some sort of agreement. Also, I will pay for you to come by bus from Riga to Vilnius. Yesterday I bought tickets for our acrobats. The plan is that they will fly to Vilnius late Friday night. Then Wednesday we will all take the bus to Riga and see the city. Early Thursday morning they will fly to Oslo. (There is a small chance this will change, but not likely.) Perhaps we can go together to Riga or meet you and your colleagues there? Also, my plan is that we will stay in a youth hostel but if you have other suggestions that would be great, too.

[Thomas Chepaitis]

Hi, Didzis, you are also welcome at the 11th anniversary of Uzhupis republic independence - there would be Latvian participants too - children writer, jazz players, actors.

What you missed or I missed in your posting is - that you have bought a book. You paid 1 Lats for it, or more. So, the most of these money goes to publisher. That's an answer (with a question inside:) " Hey, I paid for this copy, leather, paper, printed signs, so now it's my property, and I can do anuything I want with this copy. It's not lended, or stolen, here is a check.

Is this answer sufficient for publisher, or what response do you imagine?

Thomas Ch. (join my site on literary agencies)

Andrius, i propose to invite A. Krasnovas from ex-"Vaga" publishing. He, I think issued the whole "World classics" seria.

[Didzis Veinbergs]

Thanks for the invitation. I will indeed gladly visit the Užupis independence day.
As for your question — I am afraid that would not be enough. The book clearly says it is sold under the condition that it will not be lent, hired out, resold, etc. In other words — if you buy it, you accept the conditions. The only thing a sales receipt would prove is that you have agreed to the conditions. The situation is clearer with copyrighted works: then, the publisher can — and does — claim that you do not buy the text of the book, you simply buy the right to use it in a limited number of ways. The physical object is yours; the text contained within that object is not. Therefore there are many limitations on what you can do with the book.

[Sasha Mrkailo]

Hi Didzis

I need to reflect a little on the example you mentioned. Yes the book is in the public domain, if we are talking of old classics, but the book itself , the material book:paper, ink, leather is your property if you bought it. There is absolutely no way that they have any ethical right to tell you what you can do with your personal property ( the book) after you buy it. Except, maybe, but this is a serious maybe, if you sign some contract which binds you to follow their rules of use of your property. Imagine you buy a car and on the car there is somewhere printed the text: " you are not allowed to lend , sell , or give this car to anyone else. "
If you buy a book its yours , period.
Now if they find a way to rent you the book , now that is totally different situation. I think they would very much like the possibility to commercially rent you the book. Then, they would have some ground so they can demand such nonsense requests.

Very strange, this case. They don't have intellectual property ( which I think is also very controversial term) rights on the text, and they don't have the property rights of your book , yet they still want to command you what you will do with the book.
In my world this rule isn't ethical and it is very obtrusive and not natural. Its wrong. Wrong laws can only be ignored and actively challenged.

[Didzis Veinbergs]

I totally agree with you. It is unethical, and it is wrong. The thing is, they can claim that by buying the book, you have already agreed to their regulations. Buying it is a contract of some sort. Of course, everybody ignores it, which is good, but the thing I would like to point out is that we might come to a point where it would be very easy to enforce those rules. So we need to do something about it now.

[Sasha Mrkailo]

There are few ways around this problem. Some are legal some are not so legal. I am sure some lawyer could much better explain the situation and possible solutions. I , as a end user, can say that I wouldn't agree with such a "contract".
On the other side, I have just today stumbled upon a interesting therm from FOSS world Freedom Toaster http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_Toaster

Would it be practical to make a freedom book toaster?

[Didzis Veinbergs]

As far as English books goes, there is one very good and very legal way around it, and it is called Project Gutenberg. They have digitised about 24,000 English public domain books and converted them into plain text files. Moreover, they even provide DVDs with abput a 10,000 of those books. So, yes, it would definitely be easy to make a freedom toaster (by the way, a great idea for software distribution) that would make copies of DVDs containing English books.
And that is basically it. Probably you could try building something that burns DVDs with French or German books. You could do the same with the most important Russian works, although it would not be nowhere near to 10,000 titles. Some of the large languages would be covered pretty well, but you can forget about trying to build something like that for Latvian books -- there simply is not enough content to put on it. Latvian National Library provides electronic copies of a very limited amount of old newspapers, so you could put these on. And these are not even OCRed, so you get a huge picture of a newspaper page. That is all. If I wanted to build a freedom toaster for Latvian books, all I could put on it would be some old newspapers.
There is another catch. Those DVDs would contain digital copies. But books are analogue. Books are physical objects that are very hard to copy. You can easily copy a DVD: all you need is a DVD burner, which are really cheap these days, and a blank DVD. You cannot easily copy a book: you need at least a huge stack of paper, a printer with toner in it, and a binding machine and supplies for it. The Internet Archive has managed to put it all in a van and call it Bookmobile (http://www.archive.org/texts/bookmobile.php), which is neat, but it is a van, not a small kiosk, and the running expenses are much, much higher.
Now, if e-book readers become usable and cheap enough, then, yes, at least for the major languages, the problem is solved.

[Andrius Kulikauskas]

We are working on an Includer for use by people with marginal Internet access as in Africa. So that may be someday an inexpensive e-book reader and writer. Also, I am wondering if it is possible to encourage new writings to be generated in the Public Domain. That is what we are doing at our Minciu Sodas laboratory. This Ethical Public Domain website is in the Public Domain except as noted, and so are our letters and our wiki and our chat. Didzis, I wonder what solution you would like that would make more content available in the Public Domain?

[Didzis Veinbergs]

I have no doubt whatsoever that one day (and I would say sooner rather than later), books will become digital too. For one thing, I've been reading digital books since 1999 or so. First on a desktop computer (that was really hard), then on a Handspring PDA (that was easier, you could take it with you everywhere, and it was rather cheap, too -- I got it used. However, the screen was rather poor.) The e-paper devices (Sony Reader, Amazon Kindle) will probably be the ones that will finally become popular.
New public domain content would be a cool thing, no doubt. But the thing is: we already have a huge wealth of public domain content, but, at least as far as Latvian is concerned, the content is analogue, and it is pretty hard to digitise it. So my suggestion would be to do something with what we already have. Internet Archive Bookmobile is a very cool thing, but we need more than just one bookmobile in America. If, say, there was such a bookmobile or two in Latvia, if that bookmobile would go to remote libraries and allow people to make copies of rare and out-of-print books for their own libraries, then those people already would know what public domain is, what does it mean and why it is a good thing. Then, when somebody would try to shorten the copyright term to, say, 50 years after the death of author (and that would make a huge difference in the amount of available content), those people would know what it means -- that would mean their libraries could have more books of not only, say, Pāvils Rozītis who died in 1937, but also of Aleksandrs Čaks, who died in 1950. We need to show people that public domain is good. Then more content will follow.