Copyright: meta questions

[Dominik Wujastyk]

On Mon, 21 Oct 1996, Vidhyanath K. Rao wrote:

> To be specific, can anyone except BORI claim copyright on the critical
> edition of the Mahabharata?

This is important: copyright isn't a general thing about intellectual
rights; it's a very specific law about actual copying, reproduction, of
specific physical objects.  The Tokunaga files are not a reproduction of
the BORI crit. ed. ("by any means, electronic or otherwise").  If the BORI
ed. had been scanned, and shoved through an OCR, then copyright might have
been violated.  But the Tokunaga files, if you examine them, are quite
clearly not a raw copy of the BORI edition.  Based on it, yes; copy no. 
The fact that Prof. Tokunaga lemmatized the text is an intellectual
contribution, and makes the e-text quite distinct from the printed
edition.  

Best wishes,
Dominik


--
Dominik Wujastyk               Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine
email: d.wujastyk at ucl.ac.uk          183 Euston Road, London NW1 2BE, England
<URL: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~ucgadkw/>                    FAX: 44 171 611 8545