Although it does not address all of the copyright concerns with SWRB, I found this post by Tim Bayly very helpful in addressing the matter of so-called "sweat equity" in relation to copyright.

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El Tirano put the link to this and more on his post? Seems with old works there is no copyright even if digitized. Thoughts?

There are plate tectonic implications for Christian companies who have built their business model on threatening to take to court anyone who reproduces their work in cases where the heart of their work is a public domain work that was written centuries ago. Threats of legal action and the underlying claims of copyright are not sustained by the law.

Unless Christian businesses making money off selling digitized copies of works in the public domain can demonstrate they have added significant original or creative content--not hyperlinks, standardization of Scripture references, formatting, or indexing, for instance--their claim of copyright is baseless, legally. Further, threatening that they will take users to court if they share the public domain text with others is contrary to the explicit command of Scripture--that we are not to go to court against one another.

For too long, Christians have been nave concerning these claims and have allowed themselves to be intimidated by the threat of legal action. Who wants another Christian accusing one of being a thief?

But works of dead fathers in the faith are in the public domain and no matter how much money and time Christian businessmen have spent scanning, OCRing, and proofing those texts as they take them from analog to digital media, the courts are clear that they may not copyright that work.

For businessmen to claim otherwise is to mislead the public.

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DonP

For out of copyright and public domain works, it is the value added that is copyrighted. I.e. a new translation that is someone's new work, scholarly additions, notes, editing, etc. The original work can't be copyrighted; but photolithing a new work with any or all of the value added is pretty much violating the copyright of the new work. This is what I do, and that is what I"m copyrighting when I put out a new edition of an old work. That is also why I don't do photo reprints.

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Chris Coldwell, Lakewood Presbyterian Church (PCA), Dallas, Texas.
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If I recall accurately, notes and editing are creative work - adding Scripture references is not. In the cases reviewed by Tim Bayly, at any rate, the courts held that only creative work, not sweat work, could be copyrighted.

That's interesting. When all is said and done, it pays to create a critical edition with notes, commentary, new translations, etc.

*This and the above was split off from this thread to continue a general discussion of copyright.*
Let's start a new thread on this.
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