Douay-Rheims and copyright

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Athanasius

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This is probably a silly question, but…

I have a copy of the Douay-Rheims translation of the Bible, published by Baronius Press. On one of the first few pages it states:

[copyright symbol] Baronius Press Limited, 2003.

Later down the page it states:

“All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or trannsmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying recording, or any informationn storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers”.

So it is copyrighted in some way. I am assuming the copyright is simply referring to how the Bible is arranged, and also how the text has been digitally reset and the maps (except for one) have been digitially redrawn, and stuff like that. In other words, I can’t just take a copy of their edition of the Bible and start using a copy machine to make more copies or something similar.

Is that correct?

The reason I ask is because I have copied out by hand the New Testament portion of the Douay-Rheims Bible, and I used the Baronius Press edition in order to do that. Since I was under the impression that the Douay-Rheims text itself is in the public domain, I thought that was acceptable. That was all right, right?

(Like I said, I know almost nothing about copyrights).
 
Just curious: was it all right for me to do what I did? Thanks.
 
The text of the Bible is in the public domain. The copyright only applies to the typesetting, and perhaps to some materials the publisher may have added. Publishers often have a habit of making copyright claims that don’t really seem to reflect your rights.
 
Just for a second opinion…
You are both right. I visited the Baronius press site, they make no claims that they have up-dated the translation, but rather assert that they are faithful the 1899 edition, making the text in the public domain. (Of course, anything that is not the text of the Bible is another story: maps, typesetting, intros, additional texts, etc. )

Yours in superfluous addition,

Ever
 
Also, even if it was under copywrite, what you described wasn’t wrong. Copywrites are so you don’t go and make photocopies of the book then sell it at half price. Copying something down for your own use is ok…

UNLESS it is a DVD or a CDrom - in which case you doomed forever. 😛
 
Thank-you for the replies! That makes sense, and what I had always thought. But then I read something recently that had confused me, so I was wishing to make sure.

Just one more question: if a book is in the public domain, and I find a copy of it online, would it be all right for me to “cut and paste” part of it (or even the whole thing), and put it on my website? I’m referring only to the text itself, of course, which is in the public domain, and not to anything else (such as pictures, links, etc) that might be on the other person’s website.

The reason I ask is that once I found a copy of the book The Man Who Was Thursday (1908) by G.K. Chesterton online, and since I knew it was in the public domain, I started “cut and pasting” the work (I did about half) onto a friend’s LiveJournal for him to read. I also have many times found copies of essays by Chesterton that are in the public domain on other websites, and since the essays themselves were in the public domain, I cut and pasted them from those websites to my own LiveJournal.

I think that’s all right (since the works are in the public domain), but I just want to make sure…
 
As long as you do not claim it is your writing then you can use work in the public domain. (Even then, if you call it your own work, it becomes and issue of plagiarism, not copyright infringement)

How you transmit it (cutting, pasting, writing by hand) doesn’t really matter, as long as you don’t steal the intellectual property. Once the ownership of the intellectual property has passed into the public hands, you can quote or reproduce at will. Sometimes it’s a little tricky when dealing with new translations of older works, or a particular layout of text, etc. But so far you seem to have navigated the waters without any problems. 🙂

Ever
 
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