2by4 - 11:22 pm on May 25, 2005 (gmt 0)

If I remember public domain correctly, once a work is in the public domain, it's in it, much like once code is released under the GPL it can't be unreleased. If a new edition comes out, say of an old translation of some greek book, which includes a new preface and comments etc, those parts will be copywrited but the original public domain material won't be.

Dover press, for example, publishes almost only public domain works, and their books are themselves simply copies of those works, and have no copywrite on them.

However, this is just google being google, like most of the stuff they are doing, all they are doing is taking an already existing idea, project gutenberg in this case, and adding their brand to it. Pardon me while I stifle a yawn. This idea had some enthusiasm behind it about 10 years ago, but stopped being of any particular interest to the market as a whole a long time ago, primarily because of the highly restrictive copywrite laws the publishing and music industry got passed a few years ago, which made the whole thing with public domain pretty much dead in the water for any book published after 1970 or so, which then makes any idea of digitizing the world's literature fairly useless except for the old stuff already in the public domain.

Of course, if they feel that they can put true, non-public domain works online, which I doubt they do, they will soon learn a lot about lawsuits.