Re: OT: extracting a public-domain part from an anthology
Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS <edmundo@rano.org> writes:
> 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.
This is true; however, for a great many works, especially the most
common, there are good 19th century critical texts.
For texts which date before the age of printing, the usual facts are
that there are many variants as you state. However, note that there
is a contradiction between "our reconstructed text is a new work" and
"our reconstructed text is what we believe the urtext looked like".
In practice, things are terribly confusing. Certainly the critical
apparatus (which tells you which variants come from which sources) is
copyrightable. But the text itself--that's just never really been
tested.
For texts which date *after* the advent of printing, variant editions
are quite rare, and there is really no such thing as a "critical
text"--every text is really pretty identical. (However, it is
occasionally done to "update" the punctuation, spelling [or worse, the
grammar] of an old text, which certainly is copyrightable.)
> 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[*].
This is not true. If his claim is to follow a particular edition,
then he is disclaiming copyright. He may have a compilation
copyright--but that's on the assemblage, and *NOT* on the parts.
It's not too tough to find old copies of books that are in the public
domain. For ancient texts, it happens that a great many of the
Harvard Loeb editions, and the Oxford Classical Texts editions, are
out of copyright, for example.
> 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.
Sure, but that's not illegal. If someone reprints an out-of-copyright
text, with no copyrightable creative addition, then you can take your
text from there. If they do make additions, and you remove them, then
that's fine too. If they make *accidental* additions, I don't think
that's anything like a basis for them to claim copyright.
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