0 years, instead of life plus 50 years, following pressure
from content owners, with the subsequent "harmonization" of national copyright
laws as a response to the "globalization of the market". (The Online Books Page
gives a summary of the various copyright regimes, with a number of useful
links.)

Now, from the volunteer point of view, the wisest thing to do is to choose a
book published before 1923. It is also required that copyright clearance be
confirmed prior to working on any eBook by sending a photocopy of the title page
and verso page (even if the latter is blank) to Michael. The pages should be
sent as scans to be uploaded on the website. For people who cannot create scans,
it is possible to send photocopies by postal mail. The pages will then be filed,
either on paper or electronically, so that the proof will be available in the
future, to demonstrate if necessary that the book is in the public domain under
the US law. Project Gutenberg doesn't release any eBook until the book's
copyright status has been confirmed.

There is nevertheless hope for some books published after 1923. According to
Greg Newby, director of PGLAF (Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation),
one million books published between 1923 and 1964 could also belong to the
public domain, because only 10% of copyrights were actually renewed. Project
Gutenberg tries to locate these books. In April 2004, with the help of hundreds
of volunteers at Distributed Proofreaders, all Copyright Renewal records were
posted for books from 1950 through 1977. So, if a given book published during
this period is not on the list, it means the copyright was not renewed, and the
book fell into the public domain.

4. THE METHOD ADOPTED BY PROJECT GUTENBERG

Whether digitized years ago or now, all the books are digitized in 7-bit plain
ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange), called Plain Vanilla
ASCII. Used since the beginnings of computing, it is the set of unaccented
characters present on a standard English-language keyboard (A-Z, a-z, numbers,
punctuation and other basic symbols). When 8-bit ASCII (also called ISO-8859 or
ISO-Latin) is used for books with accented characters like French or German,
Project Gutenberg also produces a 7-bit ASCII version with the accents stripped.
(This doesn't apply for languages that are not "convertible" in ASCII, like
Chinese, encoded in Big-5.)

Plain Vanilla ASCII is the best format by far. It is "