On 9 Feb 2010, at 10:36, Rama Neko wrote:
My apologies if "gaming the system" has overly negative connotations, I am worried of having been unwittingly insulting.
It wasn't - don't worry about it. :)
Are there concrete examples of works that are in the Public Domain in their county of origin but not in the USA? I was under the impression that under the Bern Convention, a work was not protected longer than it is in its country of origin.
Lots - any work (in country of origin that's not the US) published after 1923 where their author died in or before 1939. For example, half of the works of Yeats are PD in the UK, but not in the US. [1] (Yes, text - but where does the OCR file live? ;-) ) For more texts like this, see Wikilivres [2] - "This site has more than 3,000 books and documents, and 1,000 images in 10,088 pages from more than 650 authors."
Mike
[1] http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Author:William_Butler_Yeats [2] http://www.wikilivres.info/