Legal Considerations When Self-Publishing a Book
<p>According to <a href="https://wordsrated.com/self-published-book-sales-statistics/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://wordsrated.com/self-published-book-sales-statistics/</a>, 300 million self-published books are sold each year.</p>
<p>I am thinking about, in the future, uploading (i.e., self-publishing) two books to Amazon:</p>
<p>(i) One that I re-typeset that I believe is in the public domain.</p>
<p>(ii) One that I composed myself.</p>
<p>I don't know who will appear as the publisher---perhaps, say, &quot;ABC publishing&quot; (if Amazon allows me to insert a name) or Kindle Direct Publishing.</p>
<p>In any case, I am wondering if either I or KDP Amazon could get sued if, say, (i) someone wanted to contest my assertion that the first book is in the public domain; or, (ii) if someone did not like what I wrote in the second case and wanted to sue for whatever reason?</p>
<p>Reasonably, can such occur; and if so, who would get sued---me or Amazon? If me, how may I protect myself?</p>
<p>I would like to make the books available to the French and United States markets.</p>

<p>The vendor has available the DMCA safe harbor provisions if you decides to infringe someone else's book – the copyright owner notifies them that they don't have the copyright holder's permission, so they take the book down (independently the copyright owner sues you for infringement). There is a complicated procedure where they contact Amazon, Amazon tell you you've been accused of infringement and they take it down, they you can counter-claim that you have the right to distribute the book, then the owner files a suit against you). If Amazon doesn't comply with the DMCA formalities, they can be sued for contributory infringement. However: the copyright owner is the only person empowered to legally object – simply asserting that a book is &quot;not in the public domain&quot; carries no legal weight.</p>
<p>If you are the copyright holder, but someone doesn't like what they can say, they can't do anything about it legally unless what you wrote is defamatory or is &quot;illegal for you to publish&quot; (you publish a fact that you cannot publish under a non-disclosure agreement; it constitutes a gross invasion of privacy...). The &quot;whatever reason&quot; matters very much. The consequence for you is that you will get sues and have to pay a bunch of money, plus the court will probably prevent any further distribution of the book. There are other sanctions in France, which I don't address here, for instance there are laws against publishing racist insults in France that don't exist in the US.</p>

united-states is-x-legal public-domain france publishing