Free ebooks and copyright ?

[duszek]

There are free e-books on the internet, for example in the PDF format.
So it seems everybody can download them and read, the works are of writers who are dead and the works were published 100 years ago or earlier.

And yet the website with these e-books quotes a "copyright".

How can it be ?

I wouldn´t like to infringe anybody´s rights.

[attofishpi]

i think copyright is 50yrs generally

[duszek]

50 would be even better.

I would not like to steal from a writer who tries hard to survive.
But if a writer is dead for a long time and doesn´t have any earthly needs any more he will enjoy attention posthumously.

So the copyright makes sense to me.

But why is pdf free and other fonts not ? On an Italian site they did not go into details.