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Re: simple translation copyright issues



On Wed, Jul 09, 2003 at 12:56:02AM -0500, Elizabeth Barham wrote:
>    Anyway, I found these in a book and simply typed them in and I
> consider these translations/definitions so vague that I don't see how
> they are copyright-able yet I want to check it over with you all.  So,
> I'd like to take this opportunity to ask you all, are vague
> translations/definitions copyright-able? You will note that the
> original word part is Latin.

Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation and many Europeans
would probably say "yes".

_Matthew Bender and Hyperlaw v. West_ and _Feist Publications, Inc. v.
Rural Telephone Service Co._ would indicate "no" (in the United States),
but I don't think there's anything *squarely* on point.

I would say go ahead.  If no one can reasonably tell what work you're
"infringing", that's a good case for either 1) copyrightability by you
or 2) uncopyrightability of the work altogether.

In the former case, if you apply a DFSG-free license to the work, then
you're just fine for Debian main.

-- 
G. Branden Robinson                |
Debian GNU/Linux                   |       Extra territorium jus dicenti
branden@debian.org                 |       impune non paretur.
http://people.debian.org/~branden/ |

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