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

Wed Feb 6 13:25:12 UTC 2008

OK, it stays publics. Thanks to your example, we detected a bug on the 
processing of line breaks when using Firefox. To correct it we had to delete 
and create the test example for As you like it. The new text is at:
http://www.co-ment.net/text/106/

Philippe

Le mercredi 6 février 2008, Rufus Pollock a écrit :
> 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

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Philippe Aigrain
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