Month: May 2009

More on “copyright” of the Greek New Testament

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Still quite angry about the actions of the German Bible Society in claiming copyright of the work of the apostles.  I’ve been looking around the web for comment. 

The best comment I have seen is that the text can only be copyright if the scholars who produced it did their work badly.  Their intention was NOT to create an “original creative work”!

If the German Bible Society believes that it is not issuing the work of the apostles, but of Mr. Aland — to the extent that it is an original, creative work — and that no-one else has the work of the apostles, then I would like to see them say so!

But the most interesting comment was by Stan Gundry of Zondervan, here.

I am not a copyright attorney myself, but I have had lengthy phone conversations with a lawyer who is credited with being the best in the USA. Here’s the deal, at least according to USA copyright law. Ancient texts such as those we are dealing with in the OT (Hebrew/Aramaic) and NT (Greek) are in the public domain and are not protected by copyright. In fact (and this is controversial), even the critical texts as reconstructed by textual critics cannot be protected by enforceable copyrights. The textual critical apparatus has a somewhat better claim to copyright, but to the extent that such an apparatus is a catalog of information, my sources tell me that any claim to an enforceable copyright is weakened. “Sweat equity” in the recreation of ancient texts is not sufficient to establish copyright. It takes sweat equity to create a phone book, but you cannot copyright a phone book. This is not something that the United Bible Society or the German Bible Society wants to hear or agrees to, this is what our lawyer consultants have told us.

Peter Kirk has two posts full of common sense on this also.  Among other things he points out that the Germans have not actually issued take-down demands, and we shouldn’t act as if they have until they do. 

 

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Flame the German Bible Society

Posted on by Roger Pearse

These greedy bastards are claiming that they own the text of Greek New Testament, and anyone who wants to use it must pay them. In the meantime they’re forcing MorphGNT and zhubert.com offline. So why not tell them politely but firmly what you think of their evil scheme? Make sure that they know that they are injuring thousands of people, in their greed? Email addresses are here

After all — the same claim would affect every classical text online.

Isn’t it typical that it’s a German business who tries to screw us all over?  They contribute almost nothing to the web, yet here they are, trying to seize the work of others for their own profit?

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MorphGNT busted by “copyright”

Posted on by Roger Pearse

This is something that makes me rather cross.  It seems that the MorphGNT project, run for years and years by Jim Tauber, has fallen foul of a sudden claim of copyright by the German Bible Society.  This in turn has torpedoed the ReGreek site, which used MorphGNT. 

For those who don’t know, MorphGNT is a text file, containing the “Morphologised Greek New Testament”.  The file contains loads of rows like this:

010101 N- ----NSF- βίβλος βίβλος
010101 N- ----GSF- γενέσεως γένεσις
010101 N- ----GSM- Ἰησοῦ Ἰησοῦς
...

The first column is book/chapter/verse, the next one part of speech (all nouns here), the next specifies the tense, Nominative, Genitive, Singular, Feminine, Masculine, the fourth column the word that actually appears in the NT (in whatever form), and the fifth column is the headword or lemma — the dictionary form of the word.

There are updates on the Open Scriptures blog, linking to a discussion group where surrender seems to be the only option under consideration.  They should, instead, seek legal advice.

I confess that I don’t understand how the German Bible Society have any claim or rights over this.  How can they claim copyright over any of this?  Are they claiming that the NT is *their* copyright?  What is needed, I feel, is a good lawyer to tell them where to get off.  I’ve submitted this story to slashdot.org.  Anyone got any suggestions?

Thanks to Mark Goodacre for the tip.

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More on John the Lydian

Posted on by Roger Pearse

It seems that at least some of the Tuebner editions of the works of John the Lydian are also on Google books. Daniel Abosso has written to tell me so, and to point out that the Bonn series text is defective, and the Latin translation sometimes quite wrong.  Here is the link (from a search for “lydi Wünsch”):

I still hope to get De Mensibus online.

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More on the Homilies of Origen

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Comments on my post asking how to get an English translation of the Homilies of Origen were enthusiastic.  So I think we will conduct a little experiment with this one, and see if we can get somewhere. 

Today I have written to an academic/publishing person I know, and asked if they can find us a translator.  They have the contacts, and I am reasonably optimistic.  I’ve suggested a price of 3-4 p (UK = about 5-7 cents US) per word of Latin — because English and French translations already exist as a guide, reducing the labour — but negotiable (well, you have to be realistic).  I’d specify a condition that the first bit is done as a sample, and nothing is owed unless the sample is satisfactory.

I have also suggested no-one is committed beyond one homily at a time, neither the translator nor ourselves.  That reduces the size of financial risk and commitment down to something trivial.  We can always stop at any point, in other words; homilies we translate are an advance on nothing; those we don’t get to, well, we’re no worse off than now.  Of course I hope to do the lot!

Money comes from me in the first instance.  A couple of commenters stated their willingness to donate — much appreciated.  What I suggest is that we donate for a homily, and get our name on the bottom as “translation made possible by a grant from xxx” (or whatever wording you like).  A condition of the project is that everything becomes public domain. 

That’s all the project mechanics that I can think of; now, where to start?

I suggest the homilies on Genesis, unless anyone has a better idea? 

There are 16 homilies on Genesis.  A French edition in the Sources Chretiennes series exists, critical text and translation.  (And I have a copy!) 

Some numbers: the first homily, on creation, is 52 pages (i.e. 26 pages of Latin), about 8 words a line, 30 lines a page, i.e. 240 words a page, = 6,240 words, or about $400.  That’s a  big price, for a big homily; indeed the biggest of those on Genesis, which don’t otherwise run to more than around 20-30 pages (i.e. 10-15 pages of Latin, or about $200 each).  But I can stand that, as the price of the experiment.

Let’s see whether we can get a translator.

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What to do about offline Origen?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The homilies of Origen are all offline.  This is because the 19th century translators of the Ante-Nicene Christian Library (repackaged as the Ante-Nicene Fathers later) were selling their translations by subscription, and couldn’t get enough subscribers to translate these works.  Of 574 homilies, only 186 have survived, mostly in Latin translations by either Rufinus or Jerome.

Quite a few have been translated in various series during the 20th century.  But under our accursed copyright laws, these remain offline and inaccessible to ordinary mortals.

From time to time, I wonder what to do about this.  What can be done, I wonder?

I suppose that I could commission someone to make a translation.  But this would be costly, and also wasteful.  I hate the idea of spending my hard-earned to produce a translation of Origen’s homilies, when so many ancient texts remain untranslated.

I’ve toyed with the idea of getting someone who knows Latin to take a modern critical edition of the Latin text, and whatever translations exist in English, and produce a copyright-free version that way.  It’s always quicker and easier to translate something when someone else has done the heavy lifting and produced a first version.  I wouldn’t care whether the result was of publishable quality, so long as it was fairly true to the original.  But… who would I ask?  I could make such a thing myself fairly easily if laboriously, if I had time, but I don’t.

If I were a billionaire, of course, I would just buy the companies that own the existing versions, give the texts away, and then sell on the companies.  But I am not.

Are there any other alternatives?  It is deeply frustrating.  What can be done?

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LXX text marked up with part of speech, etc

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I was hunting around the web for a morphologised Septuagint text — one with the word, the part of speech (noun, verb, etc) and other details, plus the headword or lemma.  I remember doing this search a few years ago, so I know it exists.  This time I was less lucky.  In general there seemed to be less data available online, not more.

I can’t imagine the labour involved in taking each word of the Greek Old Testament, working out all these details, and creating a text file of it all.  It seems enormous to me.  But… to do it, and then let it just disappear, as if unimportant?  That seems even less believable, if anything.  Whatever is going on?

Somewhere there is a great database of morphologised French.  I can find webpages that refer to it; but the download site is gone.  This was state-funded; yet it too has gone.

Why does this happen?

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Works of Origen extant in Greek

Posted on by Roger Pearse

In the introduction to the CUA translation of Origen’s Homilies on Jeremiah, it states that only the following works  of Origen have survived in Greek: several sections of the Commentary on John; several sections of the Commentary on Matthew; Contra Celsum; On Prayer; Exhortation to Martyrdom; Dialogue with Heracleides; 20 homilies on Jeremiah; the homily on 1 Kings (1 Samuel) 28 (the Witch of Endor); plus a bunch of fragments from places like the Philocalia.  The remainder survive only in translation, mostly in Latin.

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