Mechandising electronic texts

[Lars Martin Fosse]

>Prof. Gippert has asked me to post following message to the list:
>
>-------------------------------------------------------------------
>Dear colleagues,
>
>today I received an offer from a company in Munich ( H. Boessow PARK
>GmbH, Widmannstr. 11a, 81829 Muenchen) which sells the following
>electronic Sanskrit and Pali texts on disks at prices between 20,- and
>150,- DM:
>
>Rgveda, Sathapathabrahmana, Mahabharata, Ramayana, Pali-Kanon,
>Arthasastra, Manusmrti, Brhatsamhita, Buddhacarita. Kalidasa4s Meghaduta
>is offered as a free extra. 
>
>It can hardly be accidental that all these texts have been made
>accessible via the net for some time. I wonder whether any one of us who
>endeavoured a lot preparing such texts to make them publicly available
>should agree in this kind of third party merchandising. I should be glad
>to receive comments from everybody interested in order to decide what we
>should do about that.
>
>Jost Gippert
>gippert at em.uni-frankfurt.de
> 
>-----------------------------------------------------------------------

It seems to me that this is really a job for a lawyer. If these texts have
been "stolen", that is downloaded from the net and merchandised without the
consent of the people who actually produced the texts, it would seem to be a
breach of copyright. If, on the other hand, the texts have been
transliterated or computerized specifically for this company, they have done
nothing wrong. Anybody can computerize an ancient text, there is no author
to claim royalties.

Best regards,

Lars Martin Fosse