Terms of Use

From Project Gutenberg, the first producer of free ebooks.

Jump to: navigation, search

Terms of use for the Project Gutenberg website as of January 1, 2013. Valid for all sites in the gutenberg.org domain.

Contents

Audience

This website is intended for human users only. Any perceived use of automated tools to access this website will result in a temporary or permanent block of your IP address. Servers are always blocked.

  • If you want to download many books[1] manually or using an automated download software, download them from one of our mirrors, not from the main site. See the list of PG mirrors and the roboting guidelines.
  • If you want a list of all our books, download and save the Gutenberg index file. It can be opened with every browser or word processor.
  • If you want a machine-readable database of all our books, read the Feeds page.

Book Copyright

Our ebooks are free in the United States because their copyright has expired. They may not be free of copyright in other countries. If you live outside of the United States, you must check the copyright laws of your country before downloading or redistributing our ebooks. We also have a number of copyrighted titles, for which the copyright holder has given permission for unlimited non-commercial worldwide use.

License

What you are allowed to do with our books once you download them:

See: the Project Gutenberg License and the Permission How-To

Deep Linking

We do not allow large-scale deep-linking to ebook files hosted on our servers. We reserve the right to take legal and technical measures against this.

While the books we host are free, our server infrastructure and bandwidth is not. It is paid with money generously made available by our donors. We will not tolerate mock Gutenberg front-ends that pocket advertising revenues while generously leaving the cost of actually serving the files to us.

Footnotes

  1. Many books: ie. more than ~100 per day.