OT: extracting a public-domain part from an anthology
Joe Moore <joemoore@iegrec.org>:
> Ah, here's an analogy that makes sense. Consider software that is an
> anthology of works by several authors under several licenses. Clearly the
> compliling (not in the software sense) author has performed significant
> work. However, the license for the anthology does not necessarily trump the
> license for the individual works. You can make any use of public-domain
> writings, even if the copy you're reading from is a copyrighted volume.
>
> I can create derivative works from Homer's _Illiad_ even though the copy I'm
> basing it on is in the Norton Anthology of Literature.
Most ancient documents exist in many different versions. There is
significant work involved in putting together a particular text. I
would guess that this work is covered by copyright, so you can't just
take the text from a recent and expensive academic edition and put it
on the web.
Even if the compiling author is claiming to follow a particular
edition that is out of copyright, I would guess that the compiling
author still gets a new copyright; if a book is old enough to be out
of copyright, obtaining a copy of it is a non-trivial task[*]. Small
differences may be introduced into the anthology, by accident or
deliberately, and these differences would be sufficient to prove that
you took your text from the anthology rather than from the original
edition.
So, extracting a public-domain text from a non-public-domain anthology
looks quite risky to me. This is why we need copyleft, of course. I
hope that extracting a DFCL component from an anthology will be a safe
thing to do.
Edmund
[*] I once wanted a reliable text of some Edgar Allan Poe. There were
versions all over the web, of course, but they were all slightly
different. I made a list of the differences and consulted a microfilm
copy of an original edition in Cambridge university library to resolve
them. I invested several hours work into that exercise, so maybe I
could, as a sort of amateur textual critic, claim copyright in the
final result.
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