copyright & the Greek NT (possibly off-topic)

James Forsyth james at bigbeing.com.au
Tue Jun 11 08:30:41 EDT 2002


Hi B-Greek,

I recently checked out http://audiogreek.0catch.com/ which is Marilyn 
Phemister's Greek New Testament Audio files page, suggested in this forum 
by Ken Smith.  I noticed the following:

"Due to copyright issues with the Nestle-Aland text, I have used the public 
domain Westcott and Hort text, which is almost identical to Nestle-Aland."

This made me start thinking about copyright issues to do with the 
reproduction of GNT text.

Vast quantities of work have been done by the editors, compilers, 
typesetters and countless others involved in bringing us the GNT.  Surely 
it would be wrong for us to do an OCR scan of the pages (or get it directly 
out of Bibleworks or something), print it out and sell it for our own 
profit.  This would amount to piracy and theft.

However, other than the specific example above, I feel that the closer "the 
researchers/committee" get to the so-called "neutral" version, the less 
justification the publishing company would have in claiming copyright.  One 
could even go so far as to say that the only copyrightable parts of 
published parts of the GNT are those where mistakes have been made or some 
textual variant has been chosen in favour of the real text.

The only reason why we accept a copyright on the GNT is that it is a 
virtual necessity as consumers that we have our own personal "print-outs".

As food for thought, how would the "copyleft" model work with the GNT?
http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_gci211840,00.html
http://www.dsl.org/copyleft/

Please note that this post was not directed at Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft 
or United Bible Societies.  I applaud their work and wish that the above be 
taken as abstract and impersonal comments.

James Forsyth




More information about the B-Greek mailing list