LibriVox Forum

I've just come across this over on Reddit and wondered, since it's being utilized by archive.org, if this will be something Librivox will be able to take advantage of.

An obscure copyright law is letting the Internet Archive distribute books published 1923-1941

EDIT: Also relevant: https://blog.archive.org/2017/10/10/books-from-1923-to-1941-now-liberated/

But there is an exemption from this extension of copyright, but only for libraries and only for works that are not actively for sale — we can scan them and make them available.

I would say no, we would not touch this. We aren't a library. And I can't imagine someone (or a bunch of people on a bunch of works) putting the effort into recording a book in this group, someone PL'ing it, etc., only to have to pull it out of the catalog because someone claims the copyright or because someone discovers it is for sale, and we find that we've been using this exception in the wrong way.

Upton Sinclair's The Wet Parade
W. Somerset Maugham's Cosmopolitans
and
John Drinkwater's 20th Century Poetry

are the only 'names' in the lot of (so far) 62 books. So we can at least read them to ourselves.

Note they talk about the exemption for libraries from the extension of copyright, and that really has nothing to do with Public Domain: they are still under copyright. Project Gutenberg (PG) has indicated to Distributed Proofreaders (DP) that they will probably stick with those titles that are Public Domain in the U.S., and that it appears The Internet Archive (TIA) is focused on "orphan works."

IMO, I expect it will become a maintenance nightmare for TIA, as they will need to be constantly aware if/when books in this time period are republished/reprinted and made available for sale, in order to take them down from the site. (I've submitted a question to TIA regarding this.)

FWIW,

Don