From: james@...
Date: 2002-07-01T08:33:11+09:00
Subject: RE: documentation licenses (was: eruby SAFE question)

>
> I don't know if there is a way to prevent it, What happened is that
> someone in Germany translated the book and decided that they now owned
> the copyright to all the content (including, interestingly, all the
> figures and code). As the new copyright holder, they then felt free to
> change the license under which the work was released (because all
> these schemes enforce the license through copyright).

The main page of the translation has this line:

Copyright des englischen Originals � 2000 Addison Wesley Longman, Inc.
Released under the terms of the Open Publication License V1.0. That
reference is available for download. "

This is followed by:

Copyright der deutschen �bersetzung � 2002 J�rgen Katins
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under
the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1 or any later
version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant
Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover Texts. A copy
of the license is included in the section entitled "GNU Free Documentation
License".

I gather there is nothing to stop anybody from translating the English
version into German again, with copyright assigned to Addison Wesley
Longman, or Dave & Andy.  The version might end up being remarkably similar
to Herr Katins' version, but, after all, this is essentially technical
writing, not high-art literature, so similarities are inevitable.  (That's
*not* to say the book does not have literary qualities in addition to its
technical merits!)

BTW, who owns the copyright on the familiar pictures found here?
http://home.vr-web.de/juergen.katins/ruby/index.html

Or are they translations, too?

James