Amazon Kindle

Copyright is important to us – we want to make sure that no author or other copyright holder has their work claimed and sold by anyone else. If you have the sole publishing rights for the content, you may sell it in the Kindle store and also make it available on your web site. If the book(s) are in the public domain, they may also be sold in the Kindle store and be available for free on the web. However, just because you find content on the web does not mean it is in the public domain.

We can’t accept content that closely matches content that is freely available on the web, for which you do not hold the sole publishing rights, or that which is not in the public domain. For example, content from Wikipedia and content with private label rights are not allowed since it disappoints our customers to pay for content that is freely available on the web.

In the early days of the interwebs — my online archives go back to 1993 — I learned that material on the web, while not legally in the public domain, from a practical point of view, often gets treated like that.

I’m not worried, as I have the only rights to my own works.

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Addendum:
I got what I can only assume was a “robot generated” e-mail, threatening to pull two texts from Kindle Direct Publishing, unless I was able to provide a URL and proof that the material was not public domain.

It’s not public domain, that’s for sure. It’s mine, all mine. How much has been scraped off by “robots?” Distributed elsewhere, disseminated to the four corners of the inter-webs?

Why are they called “robot spiders?”
The process is a software spider
And saying ‘robot’ implies hardware
When there is none.
I pity the real robots
So maligned.

After investigation, Kindle figured it out. I’m not public domain.

Are they always this bright?