Tamil Books - Copyright Clarification Needed

vijayanarasimhan · Post by **vijayanarasimhan** » March 22nd, 2019, 8:59 am

Hello,

I am interested in recording Tamil language books.

I need some clarifications regarding copyrights.

1. Tamil books that are very old (at least a 1000 year old - these are fully poems / verses / epics)
2. Recent books (mostly prose form) whose copyright have expired - according to our local laws (60 years after the author's death) - and our government have nationalized them
3. Books whose copyrights have been acquired by the government and nationalized

(Most of the books under category 2 and 3 are published after 1923!)

Our government have nationalized these books and have also declared that these must be available "globally" for all to use and have released them under CC0 1.0 (CC0 Universal Public Domain Dedication License)

Below is a link to the GO: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tamil-Nadu-Nationalized-Books-Public-Domain-Declaration.jpg

Some of these books are available in Wikisource too.

So, are these okay to be read here in LV?

Please clarify!

(Also, I am posting this here since the dedicated forum thread for Tamil seems to be dormant! Sorry if I've messed things up!)

Regards
V

Cori · Post by **Cori** » March 28th, 2019, 1:11 pm

Hi Vijay, nothing's messed up, this is a good place to ask.

This is all my understanding -- I am not a lawyer, and this is in no way legal advice. Sorry it's long, please let me know if I don't explain what I think very well.

1. Tamil books that are very old (at least a 1000 year old - these are fully poems / verses / epics)

1. These would be fine as long as it's a copy of the original text, and not edited for modern readers (and that could be 'modern' 100 years ago too.) I don't know how much the Tamil language has changed in that time ... but if someone has 'translated' old language into its new form, it can be argued that gets a new copyright, and falls into category 2 or 3 then, relating to the date of death of the 'translator' too.

2. Recent books (mostly prose form) whose copyright have expired - according to our local laws (60 years after the author's death) - and our government have nationalized them

2. We need to respect both US law and Tamil Nadu law, since you are based in India. So books of this type would be eligible for LibriVox IF the author died more than 60 years ago (before 1st Jan 1959) and was published before 1st Jan 1924. The Government may have nationalised a few authors who were in the public domain in both countries anyway.

The date of death and publication are the only important factors in this category. Nationalised status is irrelevant where the dates are both old enough. These dates also roll forward one year every year, unless the law changes.

3. Books whose copyrights have been acquired by the government and nationalized

3. This is the most complicated one.

Again, we need to respect US law too because of where our files end up stored. The assertion that these are available 'globally' is great for people abroad who want to read them on the internet, or to download them. No-one will get sued for doing that. But I don't think it can supercede existing US law for us. I'm basing my thinking on this diagram which is a great flow chart for US copyright. So I would say no books published between 1st Jan 1924 and 31st Dec 1977 (since the DMK took office and started this nationalisation program in May 1996, but the relevant US copyright law was locked in place on 1 January 1996.) They will come into the public domain year by year (books from 1924 in 2020, 1925 in 2021 and so on.) Date of author's death is irrelevant to US law for this time period. Books published after 1977, it relates to author's death again, so won't be eligible for a really long time.

Happy to discuss this here in this thread, I am doing my best to understand the docs linked, but other people may read them differently.

Cori · Post by **Cori** » March 28th, 2019, 1:20 pm

(I'm thinking twice about #3. Anyone else have an opinion/reading here?)

Cori · Post by **Cori** » March 28th, 2019, 1:45 pm

The safest thing would be contacting Project Gutenberg and seeing if they have an opinion. Many of our books come from there, as they have the ability to do legal due diligence that we cannot. You don't need to upload the text there before we can record it (though it would be great to have the books there too, if they are eligible.)

vijayanarasimhan · Post by **vijayanarasimhan** » March 30th, 2019, 10:19 am

Hi

Thanks a lot for your detailed reply. I am very pleased that you spent your time to think, compile, and type it!

I will start with some of category 1 books (making sure their texts are not edited in recent times - this will be easy, as we usually have a revered approach to our ancient texts!)

I will also contact PG for their opinion / help.

Thanks again, you reply really means a lot to me...

(Also, I think I can take the liberty to thank you on behalf of all those Tamils who'd enjoy some of the Tamil texts in public domain audio format

)

Regards,
KVN