Bought a book that is in the public domain ... but the T&amp;A of company says I can&#39;t redistribute it I purchased an ebook that I'm 100% sure is in the public domain (published in 70's, no copyright notice or copyright reg with us office). However, the company I bought the ebook from has this in their terms and agreements that I had to agree to before checking out: "all content included on this site, such as ... digital downloads ... is the property of [company]". To clarify the website that I purchased the book from is the same company that originally published/ wrote the book. So, my question: While this document is in the public domain, can I legally redistribute it, or due to the terms and agreements can I not?
The text may be public domain in the United States It depends on when it was created/published. The eBook is subject to its own copyright The eBook itself is a derivative work and subject to its own copyright protection. The translation of an ink and paper book into an eBook contains enough artistic choice to trigger copyright protection. If the original is really public domain, you can copy the text but not the eBook.
Their code, their rules A copyright holder is free to offer their work under none, one or many licences. They can, at the same time, use their own work however they see fit without regard to the licences they have given/sold to others (except, they can only give one person an exclusive licence). As an analogy, let’s say I own a fleet of cars. I can drive my cars anytime I want. I can let Jim drive my cars anytime he wants for free. I can let Mary drive a specific car on Thursdays and only within 10km of the depot. I can let Joe drive my cars providing he pays me $50 a day. And I’m not going to let Fred drive them at all because Fred’s a jerk. Each of those is a different licence.
Basically, statement 3 above is correct. The owner of the copyright in a work may release that work unmder different, even incompatible, licenses, as many times as s/he chooses to do. None of these releases cancels or invalidates any other. A person who obtains a work from a site where it is listed under a particular license, may rely on that license grant. The owner may (if the site allows) modify the license or remove the posted work, but this does not invalidate the license granted to those who obtained the work before any modification or removal. An incorrect or incomplete copyright notice does not, under current law. invalidate the copyright, and to the best of my understanding will not invalidate either of the license mentioen in the question.
It's not clear to me that your website is, per se, illegal. (Though good luck finding a webhost with a hard drive large enough to store it. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone is roughly 38,000 characters. If I've done my calculations correctly, storing all of the strings of this length or shorter would require something like 1053760 GB of storage. Give or take.) The main problem is in distributing the &quot;index&quot; of the string containing the text of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. This index is just the integer obtained by taking the entire text as a string and treating it as a number in base 26 (A = 1, B = 2, etc.) In other words, all of the information contained in the book is also contained in the index number, and in a relatively simple way. Distributing this number is therefore entirely equivalent to distributing the text; you don't need the website at all. It's entirely analogous to e-mailing the text to someone else; in that process, the text is transformed into a number (in binary, under a different encoding scheme) along the way. But you couldn't seriously argue in a court of law that you were not distributing the text, you were just telling a friend about a very large number. Just to back this up with some actual law citation: US copyright law gives the copyright owner the exclusive right to make and distribute copies of the work. And a &quot;copy&quot; is defined as follows: “Copies” are material objects, other than phonorecords, in which a work is fixed by any method now known or later developed, and from which the work can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device. In other words, J.K. Rowling (and/or her publishers) have the exclusive rights to distribute that integer, since the work is &quot;fixed&quot; in it by its very nature, and since the work can be reproduced from it.
You can't, in general, know whether a distributor of a work has permission to distribute, or is a pirate site. I verified that they have posted an illegal copy of a work that I created, and I know that I did not grant permission to them (or anyone) to infringe my copyright. Both hosting and downloading works without permission is a violation of copyright law, so both parties are liable. Downloaders may erroneously rely on the "I didn't know!" defense, which in the US carries no legal weight. Even so, if you download my book, it will probably cost me vastly more to sue you for infringement than the damages that I might be awarded over your infringement. Usually, copyright holders go after the pirate sites, and only rarely go after particularly egregious serial downloaders.
Under U.S. copyright law, the First Sale Doctrine protects such conduct. As the U.S. Justice Department explains: The first sale doctrine, codified at 17 U.S.C. § 109, provides that an individual who knowingly purchases a copy of a copyrighted work from the copyright holder receives the right to sell, display or otherwise dispose of that particular copy, notwithstanding the interests of the copyright owner. The right to distribute ends, however, once the owner has sold that particular copy. See 17 U.S.C. § 109(a) &amp; (c). U.S. law with respect to the First Sale Doctrine is typical, and copyright law is fairly uniform internationally due to some relevant intellectual property treaties. But there are hundreds of countries in the world, and some of them might not include the First Sale Doctrine in their jurisprudence. For example, I do not know how this would be handled under the laws of the People's Republic of China, or under Islamic law.
You also retain the right to license the work to others. Therefore you can sell similar rights to MusicBook and anyone else, as long as you do not grant an exclusive license (you have already licensed another party to distribute). They do not gain the right to sub-license your work. If you had executed a copyright transfer, you would have no rights to the work whatsoever (leaving out moral rights for jurisdictions that have them and where they are absolute).
Everything you see there is copyright and trademark the Tolkien estate or a derivative work thereof. It's all illegal.