European languages. When it gets up to speed, DP Europe will provide books for
several national and/or linguistic digital libraries, for example Projet
Gutenberg France for France. The goal is for every country to have its own
digital library (according to the country copyright limitations), within a
continental network (for France, the European network) and a global network (for
the whole planet).

A few lines now on Project Rastko, which launched such a difficult and exciting
project for Europe, and catalysed volunteers' energy in both Eastern and Western
Europe (and anywhere else: as the internet has no boundaries, there is no need
to live in Europe to register). Founded in 1997, Project Rastko is a
non-governmental cultural and educational project. One of its goals is the
online publishing of Serbian culture. It is part of the Balkans Cultural Network
Initiative, a regional cultural network for the Balkan peninsula in
south-eastern Europe.

In May 2005, Distributed Proofreaders Europe finished processing its 100th
eBook. In June 2005 Project Gutenberg Europe was launched with these first 100
books. PG Europe operates under "life +50" copyright laws. DP Europe supports
Unicode to be able to proofread books in numerous languages. Created in 1991 and
widely used since 1998, Unicode is an encoding system that gives a unique number
for every character in any language, contrary to the much older ASCII that was
meant only for English and a few European languages.

On August 3, 2005, 137 books were completed (processed through the site and
posted to Project Gutenberg Europe), 418 books were in progress (processed
through the site but not yet posted, because currently going through their final
proofreading and assembly), and 125 books were being proofread (currently being
processed). On May 10th, 2008, 496 books were completed, 653 books were in
progress and 91 books were being proofread.

6. PUBLIC DOMAIN VS. COPYRIGHT

As stated in the Project Gutenberg FAQ, "the public domain is the set of
cultural works that are free of copyright, and belong to everyone equally", i.e.
that books that can be digitized to be freely available on the internet. But the
task of Project Gutenberg isn't made any easier by the increasing restrictions
to the public domain. In former times, 50% of works belonged to the public
domain, and could be freely used by everybody. A much tougher legislation was
set in place over the centuries, step by