How did it get a copy of 1984? [LWN.net]

How did it get a copy of 1984?

Posted Feb 12, 2026 19:52 UTC (Thu) by KJ7RRV (subscriber, #153595)
Parent article: Poisoning scraperbots with iocaine

The second example output text seems to consist in part of scrambled text from Orwell's 1984, which is, if I understand correctly, still under copyright. Did 1984 somehow get added into the corpus (which would raise copyright concerns), or are the names from a different work that happens to have characters with the same names?

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How did it get a copy of 1984?

Posted Feb 12, 2026 20:24 UTC (Thu) by daroc (editor, #160859) [Link] (2 responses)

The only corpus it comes with is its own source code; if one wants to use a different corpus, one needs to supply text files for it to read on startup.

In this case, 1984 is out of copyright in most of the world, so it is freely available from Project Gutenberg subsidiaries in a few countries. People in the U.S. do have to worry about infringement, since it's still under copyright here, but I think using the text to highlight a point about the use of language as an act of resistance should reasonably fall under fair use.

How did it get a copy of 1984?

Posted Feb 13, 2026 2:17 UTC (Fri) by KJ7RRV (subscriber, #153595) [Link] (1 responses)

Thank you! I misunderstood the article and thought that that corpus was also provided by Iocaine, and also wasn't aware that 1984 is in the public domain in some countries. Thank you for the clarification!

How did it get a copy of 1984?

Posted Mar 13, 2026 12:44 UTC (Fri) by sammythesnake (guest, #17693) [Link]

> [I] wasn't aware that 1984 is in the public domain in some countries.

ITYM "almost all countries"

According to my quick scan of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_copyright_duration_... I make it everywhere except:

Columbia, Equatorial Guinea, Spain (until 2030)
United States (until 2045)

Jamaica stands out with what looks like the longest period at 100 years from author's death, bit that's only for works created after 2003, so not applicable. The vast majority of the world goes with life+50 years in most cases, though numbers in the range 60-75 are fairly common, too.