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].

Coming to this specific case of CC release,what I see important for our context of open knowledge movement in India is the gesture of release of such large content under Creative Commons by the Government of Karnataka, than anything else. I am sure you will agree that we all could cite this as a precedence in negotiating with other Government entities for getting more content released under CC. For instance, we at CIS-A2K showed Goa University's Konkani Wikipedia re-licensing under CC as an example in persuading the Mysore University authorities to release the Kannada Encyclopedias under CC.

Such precedents become even more important in the Indic Wikimedia project's context as the publication of majority of non-fiction writing in the Indian languages during the last 60 years happened under aegis of the Government in India.

Cheers,
Vishnu
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_v._Rural  & https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea-expression_divide (needs wiki love)



On Wednesday 24 September 2014 07:00 PM, Ravishankar Ayyakkannu wrote:
Hi Pavanaja,

Please excuse my ignorance regarding Kannada Literature.

Are we talking about the works of

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purandara_Dasa

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanaka_Dasa

and works like

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dasa_sahitya

These seem centuries old and should be already available in public domain with no copyright claims. Why woud we need them re-released under Creative Commons?

If Dept of Kannada & Culture, Govt of Karnataka provides access to readily available digitized sources, it is an important gesture and I appreciate the effort behind this. But, not sure on the copyright part.

Could you please clarify?

Thanks.

Ravi,
Program Director, Wikimedia India Chapter.


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