On Thu, Oct 07, 2004 at 10:56:41PM -0600, stuporglue wrote:The Book of Mormon: http://wikisource.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Mormon
The part that concerns me is at the bottom:
``Content is available under GNU Free Documentation License.''
Ummmmm... most of that content IS IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN. You can't apply a license to something without a copyright. Are these people trying to claim copyright over the Book of Mormon text that fell into the public domain decades ago, and then trying to impose a set of restrictions on that text (i.e., derivative works must fall under the same conditions, license statement must accompany copies, etc.)?
That's perfectly legal. I can take something that's in the public domain, publish it myself, and claim copyright on that text, calling it a "derivative work". Now nobody can take the work that *I* published and distribute it unless they follow my license restrictions.
However, I don't know why anyone would do that, since they could simply go to the public domain source *I* got the same text from, and they'd be free to do whatever they wanted with that to their heart's content.
That's why you see a lot of eBook places taking Gutenberg content, putting it in a pdf or in a PDA-readable format, and selling it for money under a non-public-domain license. They've copyrighted that particular presentation of Mark Twain's works, or the Book of Mormon, or whatever, and under current copyright law that's perfectly legal.
Of course, anyone else can go to PG and get that same text for free with no license and no copyright, so it's hard to figure out why people would go for the non-public-domain work.
On the other hand, the chapter headings and footnotes *are* (so far as I can tell) _not_ in the public domain, and so redistributing those is not legal. I'm also not sure what the most recent public domain version of the Book of Mormon is, so some of the changes [http://www.jefflindsay.com/LDSFAQ/FQ_changes.shtml]
to the text (especially those made in the 1981 text) might still be under copyright as well, although I'm not sure how that would work.
~ross
--
This sentence would be seven words long if it were six words shorter.
____________________
BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ ___________________________________________________________________
List Info: http://uug.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
