In reply to Trent Buck:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Books_v._Cigarettes
Sadly not on gutenberg.net.au anymore, because the US/AU FTA moved it out of the public domain :-/
Not true. You just have to bore a bit deeper. It's actually in a collection, "Fifty Orwell's Essays". See http://gutenberg.net.au/pages/orwell.html Even if it wasn't there, the FTA would be unlikely to be the immediate reason. While the FTA shifted us from death of author plus 50 years to death plus 70 years, John Howard (bless his heart) didn't make it retroactive (as happened in some other countries, like Ireland -- possibly the U.S. too, but I'm not so sure about the retroactivity of their change). So, in Australia at least, George Orwell's works came into the public domain in the year 2000, and have stayed there since. But in Ireland, weirdly, James Joyce's works came out of copyright under the death+50 rule, but went back into copyright when the Irish government shifted to death+70 and made it retro-active. (And I guess by now Joyce has gone out of copyright again, even under death+70.) To make it clear, it depends on the country where the copying happens (not on where the author is from). So, James Joyce also when out of copyright in Australia and stayed in the public domain. But in Ireland (and in other countries that changed retroactively), George Orwell went out of copyright and then back in. That, I think, was behind that notorious Amazon Kindle "re-call". The reason I mention James Joyce is a radio program I listened to last decade. An Australian playwright had written (wrought?) a play about James Joyce, which made great use of actual quotations from Joyce's work, which was OK under Australian law because Joyce was in the public domain. But when she took it to be performed at the Joyce Festival in Dublin, she couldn't do it, because Joyce was still under copyright, and the Joyce Estate wouldn't give permission. It wasn't so much a matter of money as that the Joyce Estate thought the play was too critical of their revered ancestor. The copyright monopoly gives absolute power to copyright holders. If they're evil corporations, at least they can usually be bought off by money (as much as they think they can get away with). But if they're devoted family members, they may have emotional reasons for blocking use.
Looks like the Russians are hosting it (bottom of article), yay.
Most likely it's just because they have it conveniently as a stand-alone essay file, not packaged in a big collection. Actually, before I bored into Gutenberg AU, I did worry that perhaps Orwell had been taken down from their website. When I saw other Orwell works listed, I figured that was unlikely to be the case, so I looked deeper and found "Books versus Cigarettes" in that collection as I said above. But I had been worried, for the following reason: In Australia, Orwell is in the public domain (well really "Orwell's written works"). So you can freely download Orwell's texts from gutenberg.net.au to a computer in Australia. (This assuming that gutenberg.net.au is physically hosted in Australia, which I'm pretty sure is the case.) But if you download from gutenberg.net.au to a machine in another country where Orwell is still under copyright, then you're violating copyright. I was worried that some zealous copyright holder might have claimed that Gutenberg AU was enabling that overseas copyright violation, and ordered a take-down on that account. While that I think is a theoretical risk, it's probably not likely, merely because Gutenberg AU is too small a target for them to bother with. It all goes to show how weird and unworkable are our current copyright laws. -- Smiles, Les.