MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - How to copy HTML and keep the formatting?

skreutzer · 07-19-2014, 05:11 AM

Being a member of the church of Sweden and paying taxes doesn't give you any right to violate the restrictive licensing of this Bible text. It is completely irrelevant if the text is sold or not, you have to wait for 70 years after the death of the authors or so before it gets into Public Domain. However, you might be allowed to create an e-book for your own personal use (if there is a fair-use concept in Swedish law, German law has the “Privatkopie”), or the license has an exception for it explicitely. If the situation is this worse with Swedish Bible translations, you should immediately start a freely licensed (GNU AGPL3 or CC BY-SA) new translation just as the German “Offene Bibel”. The other question is what Jesus would say to violate the law if there are other (well, more labourful) ways to create and use alternatives. Regardless of your answer to your question, some operations like christian websites or missions can't affort to being sued by a Bible Society or publishing house for copyright infringement, so they're either getting a quite useless permission from the publisher which only permits them to use the text, not their readers, or they can't use a modern Bible text on their website at all. In any case, see “The Christian Commons” by Tim Jore of Distant Shores Media, where I would slightly disagree here and there (I believe publishing a Bible text under a restrictive license is both highly unethical and unbiblical), but it's a great introduction to the topic. Pasting your HTML to Pastebin is most likely a copyright violation on your behalf, since you're doing unauthorized distribution here. Same goes for PeterT's EPUB hosted as an attachment to his post. Why do you need an “authentic looking” first page with ISBN, publisher and relevant metadata for your own, personal use?

You can change the HTML by automated XML processing, with XSLT for instance.

I work on a project which is dedicated to develop freely licensed tools to process Bible texts (in German language, we work on freely licensed Bible texts and those in Public Domain). EPUB, HTML and PDF generation are supported (depending on the quality of your source file), see freie-bibel.de (project description) and the attempt to internationalize the software development under free-scriptures.org. However, I myself won't do any work on restrictively licensed Bible texts, instead, I want to see them abolished completely. But I can't keep you from using those tools, which is part of your digital freedom as a user of computers. Please consider to join the free efforts in one way or another, obviously a freely licensed modern Swedish Bible translation would be a high priority task, which would have saved your time now if it would already exist, because everybody would be allowed to produce and distribute EPUBs from it.

07-19-2014, 05:11 AM	#34
skreutzer Software Developer Posts: 190 Karma: 89000 Join Date: Jan 2014 Location: Germany Device: PocketBook Touch Lux 3	Being a member of the church of Sweden and paying taxes doesn't give you any right to violate the restrictive licensing of this Bible text. It is completely irrelevant if the text is sold or not, you have to wait for 70 years after the death of the authors or so before it gets into Public Domain. However, you might be allowed to create an e-book for your own personal use (if there is a fair-use concept in Swedish law, German law has the “Privatkopie”), or the license has an exception for it explicitely. If the situation is this worse with Swedish Bible translations, you should immediately start a freely licensed (GNU AGPL3 or CC BY-SA) new translation just as the German “Offene Bibel”. The other question is what Jesus would say to violate the law if there are other (well, more labourful) ways to create and use alternatives. Regardless of your answer to your question, some operations like christian websites or missions can't affort to being sued by a Bible Society or publishing house for copyright infringement, so they're either getting a quite useless permission from the publisher which only permits them to use the text, not their readers, or they can't use a modern Bible text on their website at all. In any case, see “The Christian Commons” by Tim Jore of Distant Shores Media, where I would slightly disagree here and there (I believe publishing a Bible text under a restrictive license is both highly unethical and unbiblical), but it's a great introduction to the topic. Pasting your HTML to Pastebin is most likely a copyright violation on your behalf, since you're doing unauthorized distribution here. Same goes for PeterT's EPUB hosted as an attachment to his post. Why do you need an “authentic looking” first page with ISBN, publisher and relevant metadata for your own, personal use? You can change the HTML by automated XML processing, with XSLT for instance. I work on a project which is dedicated to develop freely licensed tools to process Bible texts (in German language, we work on freely licensed Bible texts and those in Public Domain). EPUB, HTML and PDF generation are supported (depending on the quality of your source file), see freie-bibel.de (project description) and the attempt to internationalize the software development under free-scriptures.org. However, I myself won't do any work on restrictively licensed Bible texts, instead, I want to see them abolished completely. But I can't keep you from using those tools, which is part of your digital freedom as a user of computers. Please consider to join the free efforts in one way or another, obviously a freely licensed modern Swedish Bible translation would be a high priority task, which would have saved your time now if it would already exist, because everybody would be allowed to produce and distribute EPUBs from it. Last edited by skreutzer; 07-19-2014 at 05:25 AM.