[Wikipedia-l] Another PD Resource -- afraid not

[Ian]

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 at houseag.com XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX wrote:

> On Fri, Nov 09, 2001 at 11:50:58PM +0000, Gareth Owen wrote:
> > Robert Bihlmeyer <robbe+wiki at 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