[sword-devel] NASB

[Peter von Kaehne]

On Wed, 2017-02-22 at 22:55 +0000, Matt Zabojnik wrote:
> . Could you point me to a
> reliable resource that I can use to find out who the copyright owners
> are for public domain resource, in order to request permission to
> distribute? I'm not asking you to do the leg work for me, but perhaps
> to simply recommend a reliable resource for finding what I need. I
> seem to misunderstand what is meant by public domain when referenced
> on the Crosswire wiki. 

Hi Matt,

The point of a public domain text is that all copyrights have expired.
There is no one anymore to ask. 

While this is in theory a clean cut and either or thing, it can by
quite difficult in the specific by virtue of changing legislation over
the years and by way of difference in legislation between different
jurisdictions.

In theory it is simply time expiration. So a Martin Luther text from
15XX is definitely PD. Curiously though a similarly aged KJV is at
least in Britain under crown copyright - though in the public domain in
the rest of the world. 

So, what this practically for CrossWire means is each text which is
potentially in the public domain needs to be carefully assessed whether
it truly is. 

Secondly and separately to the copyright there is textual accuracy.
Many important public domain texts have a curator. Sometimes several
and competing ones. That is a person or organisation which tries to
ensure that that the best possible text is preserved and published. You
do not usually need to ask such a curator for permission, the text is
in the public domain after all, but you should feed all errors etc
found back to them. That is our policy. 

Thirdly sometimes some curators, e.g, CCEL applies spurious copyrights
to markup etc or even worse onto the text despite this being not
legally correct. This can leave you in a doubtful place. We try to
avoid working with people who claim doubtful copyrights where none
exist. 

Peter