The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation:
Cease and Desist Responses

The Foundation operates in support of Project Gutenberg. Project Gutenberg operates in strict conformance to the copyright laws of the United States, and is highly motivated to identify items which are public domain in the United States for addition to the Project Gutenberg collection.

For various reasons, persons and organizations claiming to own copyright to some of the public domain works that Project Gutenberg redistributes often choose to contact PGLAF. Usually, the contact consists of variations on asserting copyright ownership over a public domain item, and insisting that we remove it from our collection.

These pages include some of our responses to such letters, in the hopes that they will be useful to other advocates of the public domain. They might also be helpful to organizations considering sending such a letter to the Foundation.

Some brief facts concerning these types of correspondence:

• Project Gutenberg operates only in the United States, and we only post our files to servers in the United States.
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• Our full copyright procedures are available here: http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:Copyright_How-To
• Our procedures for asserting public domain status on an eBook have been extensively reviewed by lawyers with speciality in copyright

Sample Responses

Our responses indicate the nature of the complaint, the eBook(s) or authors involved, and our proposed resolution to the issues raised.

• Response to L'Illustration, a French site, complaining about trademark infringement. Apart from claiming a registered tradmark which does not exist, this letter made the mistake of thinking that words are trademarked. If a use of a trademark (word, phrase, etc.) is not confusingly similar to the protected trademark, then there is no infringement.
• Response to Gone with the Wind. We received a complaint that PG must stop PG of Australia from distributing this title, which is copyrighted in the US but public domain in Australia. The response specifies that PGLAF/PG does not run PG of Australia.
• Response to Anthem, by Ayn Rand. We received a complaint that the fact of this title's copyright protection anywhere in the world prevents PG from redistributing it in the US, where it is public domain. The response points out there is no basis for their claim.
• Response to Siddhartha, by Herman Hesse. Similar to the Ayn Rand complaint for our German version of this eBook, but also claiming that our own translation to English, which the volunteer translators granted to the public domain, is a copyright violation. The response rejects their claims.
• Response to Curtis Brown Australia Ltc., claiming our titles by Mary Grant Bruce infringe on their Australian copyright. The response points out that the titles remain public domain in the US, and the Australian copyright is not relevant for PG's redistribution of the work. An interesting quote from their letter is, "Under the Free Trade Agreement with the United States, Australia agreed to extend the duration of copyright." This is astounding, since we at Project Gutenberg have never met anyone anywhere who favors extension of copyright, or who wants other countries to extend their copyright.