However, someone must have done this before 1929 of whatever the thershold is. Getting your hands of such a copy is the hard part.

Ian Monroe http://mlug.missouri.edu/~eean/

On Sun, 11 Nov 2001, Henry House hajhouse@houseag.com XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX wrote:

On Fri, Nov 09, 2001 at 11:50:58PM +0000, Gareth Owen wrote:

...

Robert Bihlmeyer robbe+wiki@orcus.priv.at writes:

...

(from URL:http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/copyright.html)

It's not clear to me how much copyright they can place on the texts

Anything classical is PD, the translations can be copyright, but then they would not be at Perseus

I'm afraid that's not necesarily true. Most classical "texts" have survived as many-times-copied manuscripts mouldering away in libraries. Suppose "Euclid's Geometry" is available to us as four manuscripts, one of which is partial. Each of these is based on former copies that have not survived. Each copy was made by hand, an error-prone process, from an older copy with copying errors of its own.

The result is that each surviving manucript has a few dozen words that are different, and some are missing entire passages. Which is the closest to the original? None is particilarly close. So a good modern edition of "Euclid's Geometry" is based on a study of all available manuscripts, which the editor has used to correct each other, given certain assumptions about what the likely errors are.

This sort of extensive editing would certainly create a new edition and therefore a new copyright under US law.

-- Henry House