There are a couple of further complications to any copyright claim on
CCEL content (at least content produced prior to their change of policy).
First, they were distributing all of that content clearly labeled as
public domain. This is closely akin to copyfraud, if not necessarily the
typical case. Once you've released a work into the public domain, you
can't really retroactively claim copyright on it if you change your
mind. You are only entitled to copyright protection for those portions
of the work produced after you declared the work not to be PD.
More problematic and troubling is that CCEL is claiming copyright on
content that was not produced by CCEL, being rather produced by third
parties who believed they were contributing to the public domain. The
percentage of volunteers who were actually producing markup may have
been minuscule, but I know there were some, since I did occasional edits
while they had their distributed proofreading & markup system in place.
I also know that I was never asked to surrender my copyright on that
markup to CCEL, meaning they're now claiming they hold a copyright on
content that they didn't produce, but that they do believe deserves
copyright protection. I wouldn't describe that as copyfraud either, but
if I believed in protection of the particular sorts of markup that CCEL
seems to, I would call that willful copyright violation. (Specifically,
I don't believe mechanical translation of verse references to standard
formats or reproduction of the presentational formatting seen in PD
printed works qualifies for copyright protection under existing law.)
--Chris
On 11/28/2010 2:05 AM, Jonathan Morgan wrote:
Hi David,
See http://www.ccel.org/about/copyright.html.� CCEL are not claiming
copyright on the text (which is public domain).� What they are claiming
copyright on is the XML markup (references, sections, ...).� This XML
markup is the version we would use in any of our modules.� While this
kind of copyright claim is dubious, it is not in the same league as
claiming the actual original text is copyrighted.
Jon
On Sun, Nov 28, 2010 at 2:12 AM, David Haslam <dfh...@googlemail.com
<mailto:dfh...@googlemail.com>> wrote:
Chris,
If CCEL really are claiming copyright on PD works (etc), is it still
appropriate to include CCEL in the answer to this
http://crosswire.org/wiki/EnduserFAQ#Can_I_donate_to_your_ministry.3F FAQ
?
cf. �http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyfraud Wikipedia page about
Copyfraud
Has anyone from CrossWire broached the subject with CCEL?
David
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