I am considering the use of some literature, for use on products on an e-commerce site. For the most part, the literature is classified as being in the public domain. Thus, free of copyright.
For a minority of these pieces of literature, they are in the public domain for some territories whilst they are protected by copyright within other territories.
From an e-commerce perspective, what does this mean? Is it simply a case that products with said literature can only be sold within the territories where they are in the public domain whilst being unavailable where copyright is active?
Follow on Question:
If this is the case, how could an e-commerce site 'do their bit' to respect the copyright? Sure, a site could limit access based on geo-IP, etc., but this could be circumvented by the potential customer using a VPN or masking their IP to an IP of the location where the product is in the public domain.
I am also finding it time consuming to check every territory. As such, is there some kind of central database which could be checked to see if there are any active global copyrights?