[skreutzer]

@elibrarian:
Just to be clear, there's nothing wrong with making beautiful books from otherweise unreadable sources for a rather modest fee (I do the same, but without the fee part because of tax law), as long as you don't put your results under new copyright restriction for another 70 years after your death in order to generate payments by artificially restricting access and violating the digital freedoms your readers deserve just as any other computer user does. I for instance would pay for such work if the result is freely licensed (I didn't actually do yet except in the field of software development), and I would refuse a restrictively licensed work even if I could get it gratis with basic usage permission. Today, all of us can be readers, a press, a distributor etc., so I need to establish and maintain for myself and others the ability to work with such material, especially when it comes to software or other works of practical use (works of entertainment don't have to be handled that strict). Additionally, the rules of digital economy tell that the production of works is of some cost, but copying and distributing them is not. Therefore in the long term, one might charge for the former, not for the latter (except optionally for convenience or voluntarily, but never for artificially restricted access).

That's my bit of further OT discussion ;-) No, honestly, I thought that some of the questions answered a second time were already answered in previous posts of this thread. From martienne's description, I hopefully understood correctly that the Swedish copyright law excludes works issued by the state from copyright protection and doesn't only ensure that Swedish citizens can get a printed and electronic copy of a document while still distribution stays prohibited. In German copyright law, there's such an exception, because otherwise the state could refer to copyright protection for official documents in court cases, which would be highly impractical. Unfortunately, the German state hasn't issued a bible translation yet... From what I understand, martienne claims that bibelsällskapet.se lies or at least misinforms, which isn't too uncommon for so called “Christian” publishing houses, but if not, potentially illegal distribution already takes place via pastebin. Instead of a Scientology case, I first remembered the Piratbyrån/The Pirate Bay case in terms of Swedish mentality regarding copyright, so that's interesting to hear about the Scientology case associated with trade sanctions. As Tex2002ans referred to the technical discussion, I didn't mentioned it yet, but I obtained the Bible 2000 text from that website by using the “Save As”, “Website, complete” feature of my version of Mozilla Firefox, which saves the displayed website just as it is currently loaded, including all elements that got inserted by AJAX or other JavaScript. But as it was pointed out, the URL in the JavaScript of that page is an even better source to retrieve the text from.