Australian IP landgrab

If anyone wants to read any of the public-domain classics archived at Project Gutenberg Australia, get 'em now.

Once again, reality has overtaken my feeble attempts at sarcasm and paranoia. Some time ago I sarcastically commented that it wouldn't be long before the corrupt copyright barons, not satisfied with perpetual monopoly control over currently-copyrighted materials, started trying to bribe governments into awarding them monopoly control over materials currently in the public domain. Well, as already noted, HR 3261 is trying to award them "copyright" protection for bits of non-creative information such as telephone numbers, sports scores, and word definitions.

Now it seems that the cancer is metastasizing abroad, as the U.S. is trying to bully the Australian government into "harmonizing" their intellectual-property laws with the monopolistic, perpetual-copyright regime of the U.S. as a condition of a proposed trade agreement. As one result, many of the materials on the Gutenberg Australia site, currently considered public domain under Australian law after the passage of fifty years, are to be retroactively stuffed back into the locked vaults of publishing cartels, most of whom can't be bothered to keep such books in print but delight in prohibiting anyone else from making them available.