Eric Eldred

Who is 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 which are in the public domain. Eldritch Press for some years ran on a Linux server from Eldred's home and is now hosted by Ibiblio and no longer maintained by him.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 inclusion of graphics 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. Therefore he 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.