Public Domain in Russia
I was looking at the license to mueller7accent-dict. The COPYRIGHT
file reads:
------------------------------
(C) 1996 S.Starostin
(C) 1999-2000 E.S.Cymbalyuk <mueller_dic@koi.chat.ru>
Download:
http://www.geocities.com/mueller_dic/
Copyright:
This program is licensed under the GNU GPL version 2 or later,
see /usr/share/common-licences/GPL on a Debian system or
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html on the web.
------------------------------
I was digging around upstream, though, and found this:
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Copyright agreement is provided in first line of the dictionary file:
(C) V.K.Mueller English-Russian Dictionary, 7 Edition;
"State Publishing House of Foreign and National Dictionaries" Moscow 1961;
Free Electronic Version by S.Starostin 1996 starling.rinet.ru/download/dict.exe;
Electronic Version by E.S.Cymbalyuk 1999 under GNU GPL, ver. 1.2, see latest version on www.chat.ru/~mueller_dic or www.geocities.com/mueller_dic
You may download original DOS-version of the Mueller dictionary (7
Edition) for DOS from www-page of Sergei Starostin. According to the
extracurial compromise between company "ABBYY" and publishing house
"Russky Yazyk", publishing house "Russky Yazyk" has copyrights on
editions of Mueller dictionary published after 1961 only. Thus the
content of Mueller dictionary published before 1961 is in public
domain. S.Starostin, as the author of the first electronic version
of Mueller dictionary, kindly allowed me to use his code one for any
purpose. You can use my electronic version of Mueller dictionary
under GNU GPL.
The Russian Scientific-Technical Center "Informregistr" has
registered the Electronic Version of Mueller Dictionary (7 Edition)
on February 29, 2000. The number of State registration is
0320000030.
------------------------------
This should be in the copyright file, right? More worrysome to me,
though, is why is this in the public domain? Under Berne convention
copyright law, Mueller or ABBYY or Russky Yazyk would still have
copyright, unless it was deliberately given up. Does the registry
number tell us anything about the copyright status?
(I may be going a little paranoid here, but this upstream isn't
careful in dealing with copyright issues, and the description
sounds a little suspicious. What does extracurial mean, and what
did he mean it to mean, anyway?)
--
David Starner - dstarner98@aasaa.ofe.org
Pointless website: http://dvdeug.dhis.org
"I don't care if Bill personally has my name and reads my email and
laughs at me. In fact, I'd be rather honored." - Joseph_Greg
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