[sword-devel] Detecting Problem Characters

[Peter von Kaehne]

On Sun, 2011-09-25 at 11:51 -0400, Michael Hart wrote:
> Since I'm dealing with a pre-digital age document, I don't see that 
> sourcing from an Archive is wrong. 

No, it is not, you are right there - to a degree. But even in the world
of electronic re-publishing of old documents there is "original" and
"derived". I am not aware of anyone who set out to create a Zefania text
as the first and best representation of an existing book text. If you
look hard enough/ask enough there is usually somewhere someone who
published the text as plain text with paragraphing, as HTML, as MS word
document, as whatever. Zefania publishes derived material. This is not
bad as such - we do the same. But to copy from one derivation to another
results in chinese whisper like mistakes during bad transformation and
nearly always results in loss of information.  For that reason we
routinely tell people not to copy out of our archives for their own
purposes, but to create their own material from the sources we used.

So, even before we started discussing the reputation of Zefania as a
reliable source and its founder as a person worthy of trust (for which I
recommend reading of the archive), the answer would already be - do not
use their texts, but find whoever digitised their text and use what they
give you.

> For this work, I haven't because I don't see a publisher that 
> would likely still exist in the same form.

So sad that is, if you can not ascertain who owns the copyright and if
the copyright is likely still existent (or at least not reliably
expired) then you can not re-publish the text. We certainly - and that
is unrelated to the Zefania discussion - would not publish a text where
we do not know who owns it. 

You are free to do what you like - including setting up your own
repository, but we will not chose to publish a text with a dodgy legal
status. An honest mistake is one thing, to risk our reputation
deliberately for a text of YASEBT status ("yet another spurious English
Bible translation") this makes no sense to me. Sorry.

Yours

Peter