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From computerworld.co.nz

A local website has removed recordings of the Conan novels under the threat of legal action from the US, despite the material being in the public domain in New Zealand.

New Zealand-based audio enthusiast website BrokenSea Audio ran into trouble with the copyright holders of Robert E. Howard characters and stories, primarily the stories about Conan the Barbarian, created by the Texan writer in the 1930s.

The material in question is in the public domain, the threat of "one accusation and you're taken down" has caused a host removecontent voluntarily, even though the content is in public domain and they have every right to distribute it.

BrokenSea decided to comply with the demands. All Conan audio dramas and audio books produced by its volunteers have been removed from the website, and a major project — a production of Howard's only full length Conan novel, Hour Of The Dragon, which Mannering had adapted into a full cast audio drama script — has been cancelled.

Under New Zealand copyright law, if a website is accused of copyright infringement, the webhost must take down the content. If the webhost does not, they could be liable for any copyright infringement, even though it isn't their actions that cause the content to be there.

This is in section 92C of our copyright (new technologies) amendment act.

SoCNoC, pronouned "sock-nock", is the Southern Cross Novel Challenge.
http://www.kiwiwriters.org/my/challenge/site/socnoc-2008.html

Every year thousands of writers create novels of 50,000 words in 30 days as part of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). SoCNoC gives writers in the southern hemisphere the benefit of a long weekend and wintry weather that we don't get for the November challenge.

awesome stuff - and they have a twitter presence at http://twitter.com/kiwiwriters

p.s. another awesome thing is that http://kiwiwriters.org is built apon a opensource frame work called Zaapt. This is completely homegrown kiwi stuff - written in perl and powered by mason and postgresql.