[sword-devel] How to secure a work on a a

[Michael Johnson]

Hello Fr Cyrille (& all),

It looks to me like you already have a valid copyright and CC BY-SA 
license on your Sainte Bible néo-Crampon Libre, with the copyright owned 
by Fraternité de Tibériade. (Earlier drafts were listed as copyrighted 
by the Crosswire Bible Society, but that is probably not a problem, 
because the license is the same.) To copyright a work, you don't 
actually need to do anything, even provide a copyright notice. In 
practice, however, a copyright notice is important in the process of 
trying to defend a copyright, so it should be done. To secure a Creative 
Commons license, all you have to do is state clearly that the work is 
released under whichever specific license you chose. I do that 
automatically in all formats on eBible.org when I have the copyright and 
permissions fields filled out in Haiola.

Because of your clear copyright and permission notice, and because your 
work is independent and was published online before theirs was 
published, they cannot *legally* claim to own the copyright on your 
work. Of course, they could try to make an illegal claim. Such things 
are common, since there are not usually significant consequences in the 
law for making false claims of copyright ownership. However, it is 
extremely unlikely that anyone could get away with trying to enforce a 
false claim of copyright. Besides, lawyers probably wouldn't see a good 
way to get paid by suing someone who has taken a vow of poverty. ;-)

To make sure you are covered, legally, the main thing is to keep the 
copyright and license notice on your published works, as they are in the 
Sword module and in the other formats distributed from eBible.org. 
Technically, the copyright notice is not required, but it is helpful and 
makes defending the copyright and open access license much easier.

Although they have been working on it for 20 years, if it was just 
published, then it is probably safe to say that you were not copying 
their work, because you would not have seen it. There is independent 
evidence of your work going on earlier at 
https://web.archive.org/web/20220811202015/https://ebible.org/francl/.

I don't see how inserting invisible characters in the text would be 
helpful in most scenarios. It is easy enough to check for direct copying 
by comparing the text. Even the ancient diff program can check for 
identical texts easily enough.

Does this help?

On 5/8/24 03:01, Fr Cyrille wrote:
> Hello,
> I'm wondering how to secure with a CC license a work updating a bible 
> in the public domain, without someone being able to claim that it 
> belongs to them?
>
> I'm asking because I'm doing this work on the Crampon, and a French 
> publisher has just published a revised Crampon. They've been working 
> on it for 20 years, and I'm afraid that the day my work is ready (it 
> is already), they'll claim it as their own?
>
> Do I need to do anything special to make sure no one puts it under a 
> restrictive license?
>
> I've also thought of inserting invisible characters in the text at 
> specific points, but isn't that excessive?
>
> Thanks for your advises.
>
> Br Cyrille
>
>
-- 
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Aloha,
*/Michael Johnson/**
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