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

[Peter Snoek]

Interesting...

A few weeks ago (14-12-00) I emailed the newsgroep of the online bible
(news.onlinebible.org) asking if there was going to be an open source
version of the OLB. A kind person pointed me in the right direction: to the
SWORD website.

A few days later I received a long email from the dutch distributor
of the OLB stating he strongly disagreed the SWORD project because

(quote) "...their website contains mostly illegal software for distributing
copyrighted bible texts..."
(quote") "...cannot agree with this anarchistic behaviour..."

I think he is mis-understanding the target of the SWORD project: to spread
the bible, make it be read by as many people as possible.
As far as I can see there is nothing wrong with using the OLB texts, when I
have bought the CD-rom. OLB gets paid, I use the sword software to read the
bible, everybody happy ???

Like chris said, I think the publishers fear for 'hackers stealing texts' or
something.
Anyway, is there really anyone who DOES own the bible?

Regards,

Peter Snoek




----- Original Message -----
From: "Chris Little" <chrislit@chiasma.org>
To: "SWORD Devel List" <sword-devel@crosswire.org>
Sent: Sunday, December 31, 2000 1:10 AM
Subject: [sword-devel] e-Sword collaboration & other copyright matters


> 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
>
>
>
>
>
>
>