[franklekens]

Had anyone encountered this problem before, and know how to resolve this?
I've made Dutch translations of some English prose works that are in the public domain. I provided them with a book cover in the form of an illustration taken from public domain works (e.g. a 19th century painting), but that is only incidental. The book itself is a new text (i.e. my translation), and I am in no doubt about the copyright situation of this text: the source text was in the public domain, but the translation is a new work to which I have all the copyright.

Suddenly, someone at Kobo Writing Life seems to take issue with this, but instead of a real explanation I get these bot like answers mumbling about public domain and how, if something is (they even said 'primarily', which is demonstrably not the case) in the public domain, it has to be published as such.

I presume this is because they have nobody there who reads Dutch and/or really knows how copyright works. They simply see: Oh, the author is Henry James (say), so this is in the public domain, so it has to be published as a public domain work.

Which it is, I repeat, definitely not. The translation is a new work, the copyright is 100% mine. But in the e-mail, they asked me to "prove" that. (How do you "prove" that a text you wrote--in the sense of translated--is your own text? They want me to film myself while I'm typing and editing the text or what?)