Eric Eldred

Eric Eldred, born 1943, is an American literacy advocate and the proprietor of the unincorporated Eldritch Press, a website which republished the works of others in the public domain (no longer subject to copyright). Eldritch Press for some years ran on a Linux server from Eldred's home and is now hosted by Ibiblio and no longer maintained by him. Its principal feature was experimentation with HTML formats and the inclusion of graphics (while maintaining accessibility for blind readers) for online books that earlier had mostly been in ASCII format. Since the works, and Eldred's derivative works based on them, are in the public domain, anyone can make use of them, host them, and create more works of their own without payment or credit.

In 1998, the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act was passed, preventing Eldred's plans to scan and publish works first published in the U.S. after 1922. He later became the lead plaintiff in Eldred v. Ashcroft, a lawsuit which challenged the constitutionality of this act but lost in 2003.

Eric Eldred has been described as a former computer programmer and systems administrator, a Boston writer, and a New Hampshire-based technical analyst. He is an independent scholar and first published online all of Nathaniel Hawthorne's works, as well as scanning many works for Project Gutenberg and others.

He has lived in an Internet Bookmobile traveling the U.S. visiting schools and libraries and special events to show readers how to print their own free books.

In 2004, Eldred was denied a permit at Walden Pond State Reservation to print and give away free copies of Walden on the 150th anniversary of its publication. In 2005. Eldred returned with a permit, secured with the help of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, to print and give away copies of the book, and to demonstrate to readers how to self-publish and regain control of their own culture.

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