The Project Gutenberg license, packages using its books as testdata

[Soren Stoutner]

Hi debian-legal,
Today I was reviewing a package[1] that contains a file[2] from Project
Gutenberg. d/copyright had listed it under Public-Domain, and it would
seem that way from the website[3] where it says "Public domain in the
USA", but the header in the file indicated that it was licensed "under
the terms of the Project Gutenberg License".
This package has been accepted into Debian through NEW in the past with
the d/copyright in this state, indicating that the FTP Masters are fine
with it (I'm just guessing). The package was since removed and is now
being reintroduced.

My guess is that the FTP Masters took the statement in debian/copyright that the file was
in the public domain at face value and didn’t catch the complications with the Project
Gutenberg License.

This is not the only package to contain stuff from Project Gutenberg,
codesearch.d.n[4] says 98 results when searching for "Project Gutenberg
License".

That is concerning.


I am taking the liberties to copy my response to debian-devel to raise greater awareness
of the problem as it affects a large number of packages. The full text of the original email
with the lengthy analysis is at:


https://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2025/03/msg00004.html

Is this really a public domain license? It doesn't seem to be that way
after I initially read it, hence why I'm sending this mail. I've
included the license (sourced from [5]) below with some comments.
[snip excellent analysis]

I agree with your analysis, the Project Gutenberg license is not DFSG-free, most
particularly because of the restrictions on commercial use.


However, as the license points out, some of the books they host are in the public domain
(although it appears that they only verify they are in the public domain in the United
States, so it would be up to the package maintainer to verify they are in the public domain
worldwide). Also, as you pointed out in your analysis, to exercise the public domain option
the package maintainer would need to verify that “all references to Project Gutenberg are
removed”, which you have stated is not currently the case with this package and doesn’t
appear to be the case with other packages that codesearch identified.

[Maytham Alsudany]

On Sat, 2025-03-08 at 20:24 -0700, Soren Stoutner wrote:
[...]

Post by Soren Stoutner
I agree with your analysis, the Project Gutenberg license is not DFSG-
free, most particularly because of the restrictions on commercial use.

It appears this has been discussed before:
https://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2017/08/msg00001.html