more free e-books online (if you're australian)

For my Australian readers, Project Gutenberg Australia and Free Read make available books that are in public domain in Australia, but are not available on the main Project Gutenberg site because of the United States' ludicrously controlling copyright laws. These would include many classics from the early 20th century.

Note: These books are only legal for people residing in Australia or other countries where public domain begins fifty years after an author's death. For people living in the United States, or other countries which have legally determined that authors may need their royalties even after they've been mouldering in the grave much longer, it is illegal to download these books. I'm not a lawyer, so I can't even say whether it's legal for Americans to read them online.

However, if you feel like quietly protesting ridiculous copyright restrictions, go to your public library and check out a book by an author too dead to enjoy his or her royalties. It's completely free and legal.

conundrum embedded within

O.k. so here's a picture. It's a link, not a physical copy. Yet it's embedded in a way that it shows up as a picture.


Question, is this legally a link (which doesn't need permission from the "owner") or a copy (which does)?

(Note to any do-gooders who want to turn me in: I have full permission from the artist's estate to post this.)

A similar question: is it fully legal to embed items which, on their original page, freely give code for embedding, or is it to be understood that even that requires separate, explicit permission to be given any time someone actually uses the code?

[Note: Sometimes the graphic doesn't load. Sometimes if you hover over it, get the URL, go directly to the link (by typing or pasting the URL in the address bar -- when this stuff happens clicking on the blank spot where the graphic should be takes you to the host service's page), then go back to the blog, it will load. Really weird.]