Protecting the rights of authors is important to put in simple terms; Copyright can be defined as a form of legal protection supported by law which gives an author the right to control how their works or material is used.
Why do you require the author’s permission?
It is important to get the author’s permission because anything you wish to do with a free ebook, other than read it, you need to inform the author. Just because it’s free does not mean you can sell it without the author’s permission or offer it for download on your website. The content in the eBook is the intellectual property of the author; only he or she has the right to offer it for sale and will appoint official distributors under what is called a licence.
This also applies to other materials such as images, music and video, so you should exercise due diligence with what you do with material created by someone else.
In this article, we will refer and discuss specifically to digital books.
Man at computer engaged in digital piracy
Copyright is most cases are usually automatic usually it belongs to the author as soon as a work is created. There is no legal requirement to register, although an author may register their work voluntarily at the Copyright Office in the United States for public filing.
Books that are registered usually have a Copyright Notice on the title page: the © copyright symbol (a letter C in inside a circle) alongside the author’s name and the year the work was created. This is not strictly by every author because a book is still protected without a Copyright notice. This means that If you copy and publish Copyright-protected text, images or files without permission of the author, you are committing a crime, and can be personally prosecuted in a court of law.
Copyright is based on the Berne Convention which can be defined as an international agreement to protect literary and artistic work, which was drawn up and accepted in 1886. As a general rule, in the U.K. and Europe.
How long does copyright protection last?
Copyright protection lasts for the life of the author plus an additional 70 years. Until such time elapses, Copyright remains part of the author’s estate and may be owned and managed by heirs In the United State.
However, books published before 1922 are now in the Public Domain along with others created in later years prior to 1976. Further reading: U.S. Copyright Law and from Cornell University: Copyright Term and the Public Domain in the United States.
At free eBooks, we support and comply with Copyright legislation in all countries, so you can be confident the books you download from this site are distributed legally.
Free eBooks does not accept the posting of books by the general public.