On Thursday 25 September 2014 11:19 AM, Rajesh Ranjan wrote:
On Thu, Sep 25, 2014 at 9:49 AM, Anivar Aravind <anivar.aravind@gmail.com> wrote:


On Wed, Sep 24, 2014 at 9:55 PM, Vishnu <visdaviva@gmail.com> wrote:
Dear Ravi,

On the copyright question AFAIK...  it is the manner in which a certain content is expressed (e.g. analyzed, compiled, paginated, represented, etc..) the author could claim copyright, as there is a certain basic amount of creative labour that went into it. So Govt. of Karnataka could rightfully copyright these works, which it has now released under CC-BY-SA 3.0. A useful thing to read in this context would be this [1].

As Ravi pointed 11th Century Kannada literature is already public domain . There is no point in re-licensing it as CC-BY-SA .
Digitization does not create fresh copyright . While thanking Govt for their efforts to make it available , please dont create fresh copyright on it . And while looking at details, There was no  point of time  in which govt of Karanataka had copyright on this content .

This effort is almost in same lines of  Open access initiative of rare public domain books by Kerala Sahitya academy happened almost same time last year (http://www.keralasahityaakademi.org/online_library/index.html) . They havnt claimed any undeserving copyright on these books . SO it is better if people involved canm correct Govt of Karanataka at this point itself showing kerala example to avoid further ambiguities surrounding license .

~ regards
Anivar



I agree with Ravi and Anivar!

I am not an expert of licensing, but the thing that is already in public domain, licensing the same under CC-BY-SA 3.0 is one way limiting the public availability of the same content. 

Rajesh and Anivar,

Purely from a copyright POV, it is important to recognize the idea - expression divide. The content per-se in this case may be public domain, but it is the expression of it that is copyrighted as I stated above. Especially, as I understand, the copyright act in India has bare minimum requirements for creative labour.

But I am willing to be better educated on this.

Cheers,
Vishnu