ROJECT GUTENBERG, the volunteer effort to put the world's literature online, may be the latest victim in the Internet battle over copyright.
Earlier this year, the Australian affiliate of Project Gutenberg posted the 1936 novel "Gone With the Wind" on its Web site for downloading at no charge. Last week, after an e-mail message was sent to the site by the law firm representing the estate of the book's author, Margaret Mitchell, the hyperlink to the text turned into a "Page Not Found'' dead end.
At issue is the date when "Gone With the Wind" enters the public domain. In the United States, under an extension of copyright law, "Gone With the Wind'' will not enter the public domain until 2031, 95 years after its original publication.
But in Australia, as in a handful of other places, the book was free of copyright restrictions in 1999, 50 years after Mitchell's death.
The case is one more example of the Internet's inherent lack of respect for national borders or, from another view, the world's lack of reckoning for the international nature of the Internet, and it is also an example of the already complicated range of copyright laws.
The issue of national sovereignty over the Internet has not been firmly established, either by trade agreement or by court precedent, some legal experts say, and conflicts continue to be settled individually. But there are much bigger copyright battles looming as more material, including songs by Elvis Presley and the Beatles, approach public domain in countries around the world.
"I don't think we're alone with this problem,'' said Thomas D. Selz, a lawyer with Frankfurt Kurnit Klein & Selz, the New York law firm that represents the Stephens Mitchell Trusts, which owns the copyright to "Gone With the Wind."
Already the copyright battle is brewing in Europe, where the International Federation for the Phonographic Industry, a trade group in London for record companies, is urging the European Commission to extend copyright protection for performers from 50 years to 70 years, or even to the 95 years generally given to sound recordings in the United States.
Without that extension, recordings from musical artists of the 1950's and 1960's will start entering the public domain in the 20 European Union nations this decade and next, allowing anyone to profit from them without paying performer royalties.
The first prominent rocker to be affected, according to the federation, is Elvis Presley, whose 1954 single "That's All Right'' is set to become copyright-free in the European Union in January.
More important - at least to EMI Records - the Beatles catalog would begin to fall into the public domain in the European Union starting with "Love Me Do" in 2013, although the publishing rights would remain intact. In the United States, performer rights are protected for 95 years.
Terry Carroll, an intellectual property lawyer who teaches copyright law at Santa Clara University School of Law in Santa Clara, Calif., said there was no clear legal trend in resolving Internet copyright conflicts.
This is not the first time that "Gone With the Wind" has been at the center of copyright action. The Mitchell estate took the Houghton Mifflin Company to court in 2001 over the publication of "The Wind Done Gone," a novel by Alice Randall set on the same plantation but told from the perspective of a slave. After an initial legal victory for Houghton Mifflin, that copyright infringement case ended with an out-of-court settlement with the Mitchell estate that allowed the book to be published.
Mr. Selz, the lawyer with the firm that represents the Stephens Mitchell Trusts, said the law firm and the estate were still exploring what action to take in the Australian case.
He said his firm had merely exchanged e-mail messages with Project Gutenberg and was surprised to hear that the "Gone With the Wind" text was no longer accessible. The project's founder, Michael Stern, did not reply to e-mail messages requesting comment.
But in a radio interview this year, Col Choat, the coordinator of Project Gutenberg in Australia, said that about 300 books on his site were free of copyright protection in Australia but not in the United States. Among them were Hitler's "Mein Kampf," "My Brilliant Career" by Miles Franklin, "1984" by George Orwell and the Sherlock Holmes books by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Those texts were still at www.gutenberg .net.au last week.
"It may be that just the threat of pressure was enough incentive to get it removed," Mr. Carroll, the California lawyer, said. "Project Gutenberg is made up of volunteers and doesn't have deep pockets."
Another reason for the quick removal of the book may be a trade agreement, expected to be ratified by the United States and Australia this year, that would require Australia to enforce a copyright limit of 70 years after the death of the author.
That duration would be stronger than existing Australian law, but not as protective as current United States law and would put "Gone With the Wind" back under restrictions in Australia until 2019.
The world's protection of creative content may eventually settle at around the same level, say, life plus 70 years, Mr. Carroll said. The danger, he added, is that the most restrictive governments will be the ones setting that level.
"National laws are going to infringe on copyrights around the world," he said.
