[sword-devel] e-Sword collaboration & other copyright matters

[Chris Little]

I got the following from Rick Meyers, who writes e-Sword.

>> Quote >>
Chris, we should work together to get the various publishers to allow
"their" resources made available for both of "our" products.  Hopefully for
free!

In His service,

Rick Meyers
rick@e-sword.net
<< End Quote <<

He doesn't appear to be that interested in moving to the Sword API from his
own proprietary format, but he's interested in collaborating on the
publisher front.  Does this sound wise to the rest of you?  If so, Jonathan
(I figure this is your area), could you contact him, fill him in on your
work so far, and see how he can help.

If we want to extend this further, I believe we could convince the people at
TOLBSS to join us also in asking publishers for permission to freely
distribute texts they own.  The up side is that we would get more help
dealing with publishers.  The down side is that the publishers may get the
impression that they would be giving too much away by granting this sort of
permission to multiple projects at once.

Some good news also: I got permission from Larry Nelson for us to distribute
all his works, except those which require royalty payments to others.  That
means we can distribute the JPS translation (which has been down for a month
or so, since I found out we didn't have permission to distribute it), the
Rotherham translation (in progress), and the Murdock translation (still
being worked on by him).  Larry is also going to contact me with some
information about the Brenton, Lamsa, and Phillips translations, regarding
their necessary royalty payments.  We can judge from that information
whether we want to pursue distributing them.  The payments may be reasonable
enough to allow us to just pay for them ourselves or we might consider
something like selling unlock codes through PayPal.

--Chris