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Wikipedia:Copyright problems/2013 January 14

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14 January 2013

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Suspected copyright violations (CorenSearchBot reports)

SCV for 2013-01-14 Edit

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Tagged page has been deleted. Hut 8.5 22:40, 9 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
OTRS have permission logged. Hut 8.5 22:40, 9 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Tagged page has been deleted. Hut 8.5 22:40, 9 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Cut-and-paste move, no point fixing it since same editor wrote both pages. Hut 8.5 22:40, 9 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Cut-and-paste move, no point fixing it since same editor wrote both pages. Hut 8.5 22:40, 9 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Tagged page has been deleted. Hut 8.5 22:40, 9 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Copyright investigations (manual article tagging)
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Nutshell: I believe that we may use excerpts to analyze the differences, but not present the entirety of current, copyrighted translations. See below for more complex explanation.
Translations are what is called in copyright law derivative works - an act of translation is itself creative and attracts copyright protection. It's arguably one of the main reasons that people are inspired to make new translations. Dorothy L. Sayers would have had little incentive to make her gorgeous translation of the decidedly public domain Divine Comedy if her translation were also public domain and not marketable. :) So, given that modern translations do receive copyright, the question comes down entirely to WP:NFC and fair use.
Our policy permits brief excerpts of copyrighted text for purposes of critical evaluation and comparison, which are certainly transformative. So, in discussing Sayers' translations, the authors of her biography write:

On a line-by-line basis, Sayers's translation can seem idiosyncratic. For example, the famous line usually rendered "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here" turns, in the Sayers translation, into "Lay down all hope, you who go in by me." As the Italian reads "Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate", both the traditional and Sayers' translation add to the source text in an effort to preserve the original length: "here" is added in the first case, and "by me" in the second. It can be argued that Sayers' translation is actually more accurate, in that the original intimates to "abandon all hope". Also, the addition of "by me" draws from the previous lines of the canto: "Per me si va ne la città dolente;/ per me si va ne l'etterno dolore;/ per me si va tra la perduta gente." (Longfellow: "Through me the way is to the city dolent;/ through me the way is to the eternal dole;/ through me the way is to the people lost.")

Woefully inadequate from a sourcing standpoint, that, but sound in terms of copyright. Here, the authors are excerpting from Sayers for the purposes of direct comparison and analysis.
Looking at the version of this article as it existed before it was flagged, zeroing in for example on the section on Presbyterian churches, the sole introductory text prior to the replication of the entire piece is "The Trinity Hymnal of 1990, published by the Presbyterian Church in America and the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, uses the following translation:" Such use does not seem to be transformative. I'm afraid that as an uninvolved administrator working copyright areas, I cannot see any defense for copying the entire translation. Certainly, we can support a nuanced evaluation that uses brief excerpts - ideally with better sourcing than in the Sayers article - of what changes exist and why.
I have not yet cleaned this article as I have asked editors how they would like to proceed. --Moonriddengirl (talk) 20:59, 16 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
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