On Thursday, January 30, 2003, at 06:45 AM, Daniel Glassey wrote:Unfortunately (as far as I understand it) the way that software and bible translations works is that even if you have bought the text for one software program that gives you no rights at all to use it on any others. At the moment we have no rights at all to distribute these texts so they remain locked.
At 11:44 AM 1/30/2003 -0500, Patrick Narkinsky wrote:
That's probably debatable. In the Betamax case, the supremes ruled that fair use did include "time shifting". More recently, a judge ruled based on that case that MP3 players were legal -- that the user had the right to transfer his music from one medium to another. This seems to me to be a very similar issue, and I would certainly consider that I had the right to transform my content from one Bible program to another (even if I might NOT have the right, based on owning an NRSV, to use another program's NRSV module. As we saw with the whole online Bible mess, sometimes Bible modules are not what they are described as.)In the Betamax case "time shifting" was something the user did, not something a provider did. Also, in the R.I.A.A. v. Diamond Multimedia case "space shifting" was something the user did and not something a provider did. In other words, the user could either time shift or space shift his legally acquired copy to another time or space, for his own personal use. Neither case says a third party can provide the time or space shifted copies. So, what Daniel said, "we have no rights at all to distribute these texts," is probably correct. Even if a user has the right to use the copies we probably don't have the right to provide them. Also, there are other laws that make things even more complicated. Many digital works now have access controls and copy controls. The DMCA makes it illegal to circumvent an access control to make a copy. I don't think there is any provision in the DMCA for time or space shifting. Hopefully this law will not last, but who wants the trouble now.
Patrick
See: http://www.eff.org/cafe/drmgame/copyright-faq.html#sharing
and: http://www.eff.org/cafe/drmgame/copyright-faq.html#DMCA .
Jerry
_______________________________________________
sword-devel mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.crosswire.org/mailman/listinfo/sword-devel
