I am a great fan of public domain books, and have dozens of them on this site and am adding new ones regularly. But recently I’ve noticed a trend related to public domain texts that I’m curious about, but so far have found no answer to — are terms of use that forbid reproduction of a public domain text enforceable?
Oddly, enough, the place I see these restrictions most frequently at university web sites. For example, the University of Virginia has a popular e-text site that includes the following conditions of use,
By their use of these ebooks, texts and images, users agree to follow these conditions of use:
* These ebooks, texts and images may not be used for any commercial purpose without permission from the Electronic Text Center.
* These ebooks, texts and images may not be re-published in print or electronic form without permission from the Electronic Text Center. However, educators are welcome to print out items and hand them to their students.
* Users are not permitted to download our ebooks, texts, and images in order to mount them on their own servers for public use or for use by a set of subscribers. Individuals and institutions can, of course, make a link to the copies at UVa, subject to our conditions of use.
It is not in our interest or that of our users to have uncontrolled subsets of our holdings available elsewhere on the Internet. We make corrections, add tags, add images, etc. on a continual basis, and we want the most current text to be the only one generally available to all Internet users.
Now some of the material at the University of Virginia site is *not* in the public domain, so clearly no one has the right to go and take that and add it to their web site without permission.
But many of the electronic texts at the site are in the public domain, such as the King James version of Genesis, yet the site nonetheless asserts a right to the fact that their version of this public domain work may not be reproduced per the terms of use condition.
I’m just wondering if such terms are really enforceable? They seem downright idiotic for works in the public domain.