Restrictions on resources, Bible texts due to copyright

Question

1. Does PT8 apply appropriate restrictions to each resource based on the licences that apply to that resource? The WEB/WEBUK resources are Public Domain, i.e. they have no restrictions on their use whatsoever – but the following commands or operations are disabled:

• Print Draft… ;
• Print… ;
• Save as RTF… ;
• Export to Pathway… ;
• disabling View ➢ By Chapter;
• copying more than 800 characters of the text.

2. Am I correct in thinking that that all the above restrictions have been implemented because they are considered appropriate for resources that are “© All rights reserved”? I believe that many printed editions will allow you to photocopy multiple chapters for personal use, as long as they do not constitute a complete book, so the PT restrictions are much more stringent, and effectively prevent you from printing even a single chapter – which you might want to do for a number of reasons, e.g. in order to annotate the text with coloured pens as part of an exegetical or textual study exercise.

Answer 1

I can’t comment on your general question, but as for the particulars of WEB…

A while back I needed a PT project to play with without any concerns of breaking it, and thought a Public Domain option would be great. Someone recommended WEB and I found the files within about 5 minutes online and needed little or no conversion to get it set up. Meaning they must have been in USFM format or something very close. So, at least in this case, you could easily create your own project of it.

[Note that in the past posts have been deleted for showing how to bypass the PT copyright restrictions, but I do not believe this is doing that. This isn’t decrypting the PT WEB resource, it’s finding a free version of it elsewhere and importing it into PT just like we do with many other projects. However, the admins can delete this if they disagree with me.]

Comments

mnjames:

However, the admins can delete this if they disagree with me.

Telling everyone how to get a Bible that is already publicly-available in the USFM format is definitely not against the rules.

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anon291708:

Telling everyone how to get a Bible that is already publicly-available in the USFM format …

This USFM has Strongs Number information, which makes it hard to read. Best is Preview view, but still every word in the canonical books is displayed with an asterisk in front of it. I could use a regex to strip out the Strongs, but is there a better way to get a readable WEB Bible (that I can print out freely)?

Answer 2

wdavidhj:

Does PT8 apply appropriate restrictions to each resource based on the licences that apply to that resource? The WEB/WEBUK resources are Public Domain, i.e. they have no restrictions on their use whatsoever – but the following commands or operations are disabled:

I’m not sure what you are asking. You have pointed out that the public domain resource that you have is restricted. Paratext is not making any distinction based on type of resource. If a resource is downloaded from the DBL then it will be restricted.

As was pointed out - there are other ways to get some resources that might be unrestricted.

If you feel that resources should be restricted based on their copyright you could submit a feature request to Paratext (this site is not the place to make feature requests).

Answer 3

I believe anon848905 is correct that Paratext 8 does not apply any resource-specific logic when restricting copy/paste etc. Rather, it simply applies those restrictions to all resources.

If that is a significant inconvenience to you, you can use Help > Make a Suggestion to request a more granular approach. Are you only asking about Public Domain resources, or also about resources whose licenses seem more “permissive” than most?

I’m not sure how easy it is to confidently identify such resources programmatically, but we could see what information exactly DBL supplies to Paratext.

Comments

I strongly recommend a bit more granularity on copy/paste/export restrictions. There are many resources in the DBL that are Public Domain or under a Creative Commons license that should not have any such restrictions on them. It should be possible to mark those as free to copy, just as I have done with the entries that don’t have a gray background at https://eBible.org/find/. Yes, people can look there for USFM Bibles, but why make them import another project into paratext just to get the export working?

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anon854042:

just as I have done with the entries that don’t have a gray background at https://eBible.org/find/

(I know this is getting off topic, and if the conversation continues, I’ll make sure it continues elsewhere.)

@anon854042, it would be nice if there was an explanation on that page of what the grey background means.