[sword-devel] host[ing] despite legality

DM Smith dmsmith555 at yahoo.com
Tue Aug 23 05:02:35 MST 2005


I have been an active member of this mailing list for almost 2 years. 
During that time I have been impressed with how careful Chris, Troy and 
others are to ensure that no copyrighted texts are available without 
permission for Crosswire to distribute.

If you find a module that should not be on Crosswire, please let them know.

If you find a problem with the conf (the place where copyright and 
permission can be found) please report it.

Jonathon Blake wrote:

>Leon wrote:
>
>>providing illegal copies of copyright-restrcited translations.
>>    
>>
>Since you mention "copyright restricted translations", is there any
>reason why a quarter or so of the texts that The Sword Project offers,
>have no copyright information?
>
>Especially since at least several of them are _not_ public domain.
>  
>
Please don't say things like this without a complete listing.

There are nearly 300 modules. 25% of that would be 75. There are 11 
modules that do not explicitly claim to be Public Domain that do not 
have copyright info outside of the About field. Of these 11, 4 do not 
have clear explicit grants to Crosswire.


Below are my findings:

If you read the documentation for the module's conf the 
DistributionLicense field defaults to "Public Domain" or can have one of 
four values:
            "Public Domain",
            "Copyrighted; Free non-commercial distribution",
            "Copyrighted; Permission to distribute granted to CrossWire",
            "Copyrighted"
One might expect that one of the copyright fields to be present when it 
is not Public Domain. While this is often the case, it is not required. 
However, the About field is required and it usually contains the 
copyright info, even when it is present in one of the copyright fields.
Here is a listing of all the modules that do not explicitly have "Public 
Domain" for the DistributionLicense field, do not have a copyright field 
and whether there is a clear copyright statement and more importantly a 
statement as to whether Crosswire has permission to distribute.
ab         Clear statement is in About
akjv       Clear statement is in About
alt        Clear statement is in About
bwe        History is in the About.
           Clearly it is recent and therefore copyrighted,
           but there are no permission statements.
chiun      Unclear statement in About
common     Clear statement is in About
erxelmo_en Unclear statement in About
frecrl     Non-English statement in About. Probably in French Haitian 
Creole.
godsword   Clear statement is in About
personal   This is clearly an empty module where one can store personal 
notes.
rwp        Clear statement is in About


>xan
>
>jonathon
>  
>


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