Hey Everyone, I have been thinking through a lot of the copyright issues that we might run into (I wonder what recent discussion this line of thinking stemmed from? :-). I want to take a proactive approach to some of these issues and would like to elicit some feedback from the people on our mailing list.
We need to educate the people that are using our software on the copyright issues that are involved in them using each of the modules we have. I am concerned that with many organizations starting to grant us permission to distribute their works but with minor (or major) restrictions some users will download a module thinking they have all usage rights but they will use it in a way that was not granted to us. For example we just got permission to distribute the Finnish 1992 Bible, but in the publication permit they gave us, they state "The text is intended for research and studying purposes. The text may be retrieved to the personal workstation but copying and re-distributing is strickly forbidden.. For other use than personal research, teaching and studying a separate license by the [ELCF] is required." So we have the right to have people download it from our website and use it on their personal computers, however they can not put this specific module on a CD and re-distribute it and including this modules on our free CD and having people re-distribute does not appear to be within the rights we were given. People that setup a website to display text might also not have the right to use this module in that way...because it says for "personal research, teaching and studying" and it specifically says that it may be "retrieved to the personal workstation." It does not give the right to being put up on a server. A good SOLUTION to this would be to add the distributionlicense and distributionnotes fields from the .conf files to be displayed with the other module information in ModInfo.jsp. This way anyone that downloads the modules from the info page can see the specific license that govern their usage (a note to Chris or Troy if you get ambitious and set this up soon I would like it if you augmented the copyright.conf file that is in the root directory of the /copyright/ directory on the web server to get the latest copyright information that has not made it to individual modules .conf files. This way the copyright information is synced between the module pages and the copyright pages for a module.) A link to the copyright website to get information about the specific module might be in order also (ie add: "For more information about copyright issues with this module see the copyright information for the KJV on the Copyright Website." to the ModInfo.jsp page also) These two suggestions I would highly recommend that we add as soon as possible (I can get a patch to ModInfo.jsp soon after Troy or Chris okay this). It might also be useful to add some kind of notification on the ModDisp.jsp pages where it lists the modules to download because users can just download the modules from that page without seeing any of the specific information. Some way to inform users that they should look into the copyright issues with any modules they use would be a benefit to the community that we serve. Ideas of how to do this would be appreciated. Something like a awareness program. :) Testing == access to locked modules. One other area we might need to look into is the access to locked modules for testing purposes. I don't know what the copyright issues are with unlocking these texts for people to test...it seems to violate copyright laws because we don't have permission to distribute them even for testing. It might fall under what I would call standard practice. It is tolerable to the companies (or maybe they are not even aware of us using them for testing purposes) that we are infringing on their copyright because it is for testing purposes. But it used to be that the unlocked keys were available to anyone on this list. I am glad that changed. But still do we have a policy on who and why we give the unlock keys away. What about the people who got the keys from before and are not "actively" testing now...they now have a free copy of XYZ module that is locked to the rest of the general public. I think without a good policy on how the unlocked keys are used we could be heading for some huge copyright violation issues. I have been reading up on some copyright violation cases where monetary damages were sought and the figures that were given to these people that brought suit against the copyright violators were staggering. Check out Gigalaw.com for some of those cases. What are some other areas and ideas people have that would help in preventing copyright problems in the future...like I said I want to get things setup and work on areas before they become problems...so if anyone has been thinking about something that we should change or add in the way we handle copyright issues please bring it up. Let the discussion begin... :) In Christ, Jonathan Hughes Copyright Coordinator [EMAIL PROTECTED]
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part
