[okfn-discuss] Copyright status of the Open Shakespeare texts ?

Wed Feb 6 10:45:08 UTC 2008

Philippe Aigrain wrote:
> I did a further test on co-ment by creating a text with both parts of Henry 
> the Fourth, and it is still works OK (just takes a while to open the text).
> 
> However, while doing so, I actually checked the Project Gutenberg source, and 
> it looks like the copyright status is uncertain : is it because of the 
> translation to modern English in As you like it and Part I of Henry IV ?
> Thanks for letting me know if I can keep such texts public on co-ment, or 
> pointing me to Shakespeare texts that are actually in teh public domain.

You've just stumbled across one of the major (initial) reasons for doing 
Open Shakespeare -- that even though the texts are really old a lot of 
the versions found on the Internet display copyright notices (including 
some of those on PG). Some of these notices may be valid some of them 
may not be but who wants to spend the time to find out?

Open Shakespeare has done the work for you and all the texts we took 
from PG we believe to be in the public domain (when I last looked PG has 
roughly 4 version of each Shakespeare text PG and 2 of these have 
copyright notices). Thus you can definitely keep the texts you've used 
on co-ment.

~rufus