[sword-devel] French Darby Bible translation

[Eeli Kaikkonen]

On Wed, 16 Jan 2008, Sebastien Koechlin wrote:

> On Fri, Jan 04, 2008 at 03:02:33PM +0100, Sebastien Koechlin wrote:
> > On Tue, Jan 01, 2008 at 06:31:43AM +0200, Eeli Kaikkonen wrote:
> > > We have to have permission to distribute the text legally. If the text
> > > is not in public domain we have to have an unambiguous
> > > licence/permission from the copyright holder. It can be a general
> > > permission given to all redistributors or one given specifically to us.
> >
> > Can someone post a example of such a permission allowing the sword-project
> > to distribute a text?
> >
> > English is not my native language, and French legislation is quite
> > different, I don't know what to write.
>
> Can someone answer to this request please?
>
> It's no more a problem for French Darby translation, but I may work on other
> translations and I want to take care of this before spending time on texts.

It's really difficult without knowing what permissions the copyright
owner wants to give. If you work on translation for which you are not a
copyright holder, you have to ask them or just translate to English the
licence they have given.

If you are the copyright owner you have to know what you want the users
be able to do:
	- download and use the text for personal/scholarly/etc. study
	- copy the text to their friends
	- transform it to other formats
	- sell the text
 	- change the text and redistribute the derivative work
	- change the licence
	- etc.

One possibility is to use Creative Commons licence:
http://creativecommons.org/license/

You can at least try that page and see what it gives. But it doesn't
cover the situation where you want to give exclusive permission to
Crosswire to let people download the module and permission to people to
download it but not redistribute/copy it.

Also it doesn't take into account that many people take Bible (or other
non-technical writing) as a special case: you may want to allow changing
the format and even selling the modified work but not changing the
wording of the translation.

  Yours,
	Eeli Kaikkonen (Mr.), Oulu, Finland
	e-mail: eekaikko at mailx.studentx.oulux.fix (with no x)