At 09:48 PM 7/23/02 +0200, jens wrote:
Hello,
how do we treat the Catholic Encyclopedia? (www.newadvent.org)
The articles are from a 1912 encyclopedia and should therefore be free, but the website does claim a 1999 copyright for the online edition.
As it might be in many cases difficult to prove that someone copied from newadvent.org, it is rather obvious if typos are preserved.
Can we use such an article as basis for copyediting?
I looked at this. I think the information on this page might be helpful:
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/00002a.htm
I looked at one article, St. Peter Claver and then wrote a stub and used the newadvent page as an external link (I actually know quite a bit about him, as I visited Cartagena once and had a nice experience at his shrine there.) In the article there are links. As written with the links included I would say the articles are copyrighted. Certainly the pages of individual letter links are. It does say that the articles were transcribed rather than revised from the 1913 edition which is in the public domain. Direct copying of those articles either from a written source or from that web page should be alright. I notice down at the bottom of the article it gives a name of the person who "transcribed" the article. No mention is made of a revision.
Bottom line is I would not copy the source code but I would say the text can be copied without substantial risk. I don't think typos count anyway.
Fred Bauder
BTW:
http://dogbert.abebooks.com/abe/BookSearch?tn=catholic+encyclopedia&pn=e... lopedia