About our catalog

invoke generates audiobooks. The audiobooks in our public catalog are generated from source books we believe to be in the public domain. This page explains how we approach public-domain determination and how to reach us with concerns.

Catalog vs. user uploads

Two distinct things live in the invoke system:

• Public catalog. Audiobooks generated by us from public-domain sources. Visible to all users. Subject to the rules in this document.
• User uploads. Books that individual users upload for private audiobook generation. Never visible to other users. Subject to the user's content-rights warranty in our Terms of Service § 6.2 — the user is responsible for the rights to what they upload.

This page is about the public catalog only. User-uploaded content is private to the uploader and is aggressively swept by our retention policies (see Privacy Policy § 7).

How a book ends up in the catalog

The catalog grows along three paths, each with its own PD-determination rule.

Path 1 — Curator-staged content

Books that we stage individually after reviewing public-domain status. We apply a conservative posture: a title is published only where we have a reasonable basis to consider it in the public domain in both the United States and the European Union.

Path 2 — Standard Ebooks ingest

We ingest books from Standard Ebooks, a volunteer project that produces high-quality public-domain ebook editions and certifies titles as US-public-domain as part of their editorial workflow.

We rely on Standard Ebooks' per-title US-PD certification. As Standard Ebooks itself notes, users outside the United States may wish to check the public-domain status under their local law. This is a lower bar than the conservative US + EU rule we apply to Path 1 — we accept the asymmetry because Standard Ebooks does not expose the data needed for an EU-side determination (original publication year, author death dates) and so a per-title EU-PD check is not practically possible for that corpus.

Path 3 — Future paths

If we add further ingestion paths (Project Gutenberg, library partnerships, etc.) we will update this document with the PD-determination rule for that path before the path goes live.

What we don't do

• We do not publish in-copyright books in the public catalog. If a book is in copyright in either the US or the EU and we can't trace a clear public-domain or licensed-distribution status, we don't add it.
• We do not host user uploads in the public catalog. Other users never see your uploads.
• We do not federate the catalog out to third parties.

If you think a catalog title is in error

If you are the rightsholder of a book and believe a title in our public catalog is incorrectly classified as public domain, please contact us at copyright@invoke-books.com. Please include:

1. The catalog title in question (URL or title + author);
2. Evidence of the copyright (publication date, registration, transferred rights);
3. The jurisdiction in which you assert copyright (US, EU member state, etc.).

We will review your message and respond. Where reasonable doubt exists, we may hide the title from the public catalog pending our review. If our review supports your claim, we will remove the title and the underlying audiobook artefacts. More complex matters are handled case-by-case at the same address.

Concerns about user-uploaded content (which is private to the uploader and never appears in the public catalog) follow the takedown procedure in our Terms of Service § 6.6.

Updates

We re-review this page when ingestion paths change or when we otherwise have reason to revisit the public-domain posture.