Copyfraud : Poisoning the Public Domain is an introduction to some of the ways that content providers (websites, publishers, etc.) abuse copyright protections when they use public domain materials.  A couple of minor points, however:

• The act of assigning a copyright to something already in the public domain is the issue; taking a Project Gutenberg text, formatting it, and publishing it is of great benefit to people, as long as one doesn’t claim protection that doesn’t actually exist for the material.
• The Creative Commons Public Domain Tools is not a license, nor is it  an attempt “to become the arbiter of  public domain licensing”, but a way to allow people to have an easy and effective way to display that a work belongs to the Public Domain.

found via LISNews

The World eBook Fair begins this Saturday, July 4th, coinciding with Project Gutenberg’s 39th anniversary.

To celebrate, the World eBook Fair members are providing free access to over two million books between July 4th and August 4th.

found via ResourceShelf

I have encountered a few interesting items relating to online, full-text books during the past few days, and thought they would make a good snapshot of where things stand at this time:

• Google Book Search : the Good, the Bad & the Ugly is an article in the current issue of Campus Technology which gives a great, non-technical overview of what the project is doing, and where it might be going. (found via LISNews )
• Google Book Search: Document Understanding on a Massive Scale (Pdf) is the text of Luc Vincent’s keynote at the ICDAR 2007 conference. Don’t read it simply because he heads Googles Optical Character Recognition (OCR) team – read it because it is fascinating and informative! (posted to NGC4lib by Owen Stephens)
• Finally, there is The Top Inventions of 2008 by Michael Hart (inventor of the e-book and founder of Project Gutenberg). This isn’t your standard, run-of-the-mill predictions article. This looks at technology that is just around the corner (USB 3.0, Flash memory capacity, and the number of OCR scanned books) and realizes that we will soon be able to carry around more full-text books on a USB flash drive than exist in most libraries. Think about how that possibility will change our profession. (found via Open Access News )