[sword-devel] host[ing] despite legality

DM Smith dmsmith555 at yahoo.com
Tue Aug 23 11:51:22 MST 2005


Eicke Godehardt wrote:

> I don't want to circumvent rights.  That's why I'm not for sword 
> modules of copyrighted texts in any form.  But to provide a tool to 
> build a module myself for my use only should be ok, as/when private 
> usage is alowed.  

It is relatively trivial to create an input file to one of the Sword 
module creation routines. The difficult part is getting the text into 
one of the input forms. This is because output format of different 
systems is, well, different.

> I'm even willing to pay for copyrighted sword modules, but there is no 
> one available.

Not yet at least :-)   
I am waiting too!

> Do you think this is a wrong, dubios or questionable?  I'm realy not 
> shure about that.

I'm not sure either. The problem I have is in providing a tool that 
would be only valid for "personal" or "private" use and making that 
publicly available. I am a bit leery about being held responsible for 
how someone else behaves.

I would not have a problem in writing such a tool for myself that I can 
use on a file that I have legally obtained and that I am allowed by the 
license to that file to modify as I see fit. (I have some Palm bibles 
that I have purchased that in the license agreement I am not allowed to 
use other than with the provided software.) But I won't make that 
software generally available. By the way, I don't have such a tool.

>
>
> Shalom,
> .___ _    _
> | __(_)__| |.___
> | _|| / _|  / -_)
> |___|_\__|__\___\
>
> God gave you your face - you have to smile yourself!
>
>
> DM Smith wrote:
>
>> I work on BibleDesktop/JSword so that people can have free, high 
>> quality software to use God's Word fully. I strongly support the 
>> rights of individuals and corporations to their intellectual property 
>> and copyrights. I am unwilling to provide people the tools to 
>> circumvent these rights. I will "avoid the appearance of evil".
>>
>> JSword plans to provide the ability to work with OSIS bibles 
>> directly. At this time I have not found any OSIS bibles that we can 
>> use. It is kind of hard to develop it with out a good example, so 
>> this has not gone anywhere other than on the wish list.
>>
>> Greg Hellings wrote:
>>
>>> Technologically it should not be an overly difficult way, but I 
>>> would be wary of the way that this could be viewed by the copyright 
>>> holder and by the respective authorities.  Seeing as how I'm neither 
>>> a lawyer nor an expert on "intellectual propery" laws, I don't know, 
>>> but if someone does have an authoritative opinion on that, it would 
>>> be an interesting idea.  I have thought of a similar technology in 
>>> the past, but never was willing to put myself at risk for using it 
>>> until I had a definite legal opinion on the matter.
>>>
>>> --Greg
>>>
>>> On 8/23/05, *Eicke Godehardt* <eicke.godehardt at igd.fraunhofer.de 
>>> <mailto:eicke.godehardt at igd.fraunhofer.de>> wrote:
>>>
>>>     I have a similar "Problem" with german bible translations.  But 
>>> most
>>>     translations are free for browsing and private usage.  So there 
>>> is no
>>>     legal way to provide sword packages.  But why not provide scripts,
>>>     which
>>>     allow every user to build up his own package?
>>>     Just downloading, some magic sed/awk to transform it to OSIS-XML 
>>> and
>>>     import it into sword?
>>>     Is this a possible way?  What do you think?
>>


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