Project Gutenberg Copyright Clearance

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Information and Usage

• Overview:
  These pages are to determine the copyright status for a printed book, from which you would like to create a Project Gutenberg eBook. It is used to confirm books are not currently protected by copyright in the United States. You need a copyright clearance before uploading a new eBook for the Project Gutenberg collection. Project Gutenberg only accepts items that we have confirmed to not be protected by copyright in the United States, and which meet the other criteria in our collection development policy. The copyright clearance process on these Web pages is to determine whether a book has copyright protection in the United States, using a set of rules in our Copyright How-To. Please review the How-To before getting started.


• Are you Submitting your Own Book?
  • Please do not use this system to submit your own work, or another contemporary work (even if it's granted to the public domain or has an open license). Instead, see our guidance here.
  
  
• The Process of Confirming Copyright Protection Status:
  1. Upload scans of the Title page and Obverse (aka Verso) page (the TP&V). Include extra pages as needed if dates or other publication information appears there. These pages should included the Author, the Title, the Publication Date and the City + Country of publication. Also, any copyright statement or similar (such as "All Rights Reserved").
  2. Submit a copyright clearance requests. This form asks you to provide all of the publication details, plus any notes or other information you would like to provide.
  3. Get status of your submissions, or wait for an email confirmation of the copyright clearance decision, usually within two weeks.
  4. Scan, type, proofread, spell-check, format, proofread some more, and confirm your eBook is ready. This is the hard part!
  5. Upload the new eBook for the Posting Team to work on.
  
  
• Rule 5 clearance?
  • Rule 5 only applies for items of entirely US authorship. Include biographical information of authors, illustrators, editors, etc., following the same guidance as Rule 6.
  
  
• Rule 6 clearance?
  • "Rule 6" pertains to demonstration that an item is no longer protected by US copyright law as a result of not renewing, after 28-year protection term has expired.
  • "Rule 6" submissions are accepted only from persons who have demonstrated the needed expertise, diligence, and attention to detail.
  • For instructions, see the Copyright How-To (opens in a new tab/window).
  • Tab-separated listings of renewals are available, and may be convenient. See the New York Public Library's work.


• Additional Guidance:
  • Check the catalog to make sure the eBook you are interested in is not already completed. Generally, if you want to offer improvements for a book already in the collection, the existing book should be rehabilitated, rather than a new eBook created.
  • Check the In Progress list at https://inprogress.pglaf.org to make sure the eBook you are interested in is not already being worked on. Note that a previous In Progress list at http://www.pglaf.org/~ccx074/gutip.html is now considered obsolete.
  • Once you have one or more clearances, you can manage them by visiting the Clearance Management page. There you can view your clearances with the option to cancel those that you will not use.
  • The Rules for copyright clearances are in the Project Gutenberg Copyright How-To ("Will my book clear?" "What are the rules?").
  • There is a some detail on the processes of preparing an eBook in the how-to/help area.
  • Distributed Proofreaders has some of the best standards and practices, and is a great place to get started with eBook creation. The submission page has links.
  • PNG, GIF and JPEG are usually the best file formats for your TP&V. TIFFs tend to be large and don't display in a plain Web browser. File sizes for your scans should be no more than about 100K per page -- with PNG, good quality results with only 15-30K per page. These do not need to be high-resolution images to be readable.
  • If publication information or copyright statements are not in English, please supply a translation (you could upload a supplemental .txt file, or include translations in the notes fields, or even mark up the scan with a translation). We need to confirm the publication location, date, author, title, and what sort of copyright statement is present.
  • Please scan your images right side up, as that's how they'll be viewed.
  • You'll usually get a response within a few days. Try to be patient, but send email if anything is urgent or is not processed within 10 days.
  • We attempt to rename files to be Unix-compatible. It's best to not use these characters in your filenames: space, ~`!@#$%^&*(){}[]\/|?<>. It is safe to use periods, commas, hyphens, underscores, letters and numbers. File names are case-sensitive.
  • Files uploaded but not associated with clearance information are cleaned out every day or so. (Once clearance information has been added, we keep the files perpetually.)
  • Server limitations: all file uploads for a submission must complete within one hour (in case you have a slow connection), and the total size of your uploaded files must be less than about 5MB.
  
  
• Got changes?:
  • Your clearance request cannot be amended once it is submitted. Send an email if something needs to be changed.
  • If you need to change your email address or password in the user database please visit https://cm.pglaf.org. After logging in, select "Prefs" from the navigation bar to update your account.
  • If you are a registered user but you have forgotton your password or username, visit this page.