| Are you sure they don't own the rights? When you create a "derivative work" of a work under copyright, you're creating a new work that "samples" the original, and then asserting your own copyright to it—that's why you need a license from the rightsholder in the first place, to allow you to claim those IP rights on the derivative work. In the case of a public-domain work, if you create a "derivative work" from it, you own the IP of that derivative work, 100%. The public-domain parts that you sampled aren't still public domain just because they're copied word-for-word into your work. (I mean, the original work itself is still PD, but the sample of it in your derivative work isn't. It's a "color of your bits" thing[1].) "Public Domain" isn't an infectious copyleft license. You can "fork" and "make proprietary" a PD work, and that's 100% allowed. Now, I don't know enough about the Buddhist texts in question to say whether their presentation of them here qualifies as a "derivative work"—but usually even just translating a work makes it a derivative, so, if the TBRC were the ones that translated these texts to English? They own 'em. (If you want a public version, do the same thing FOSS communities do when a FOSS project is forked into a proprietary product: walk back to the last open branch-point of the source, and make your own open fork. In this case: translate the texts yourself!) [1] https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 --- Also, there might be a more interesting consideration at play in this particular case: if a work is never published, then AFAIK, it never enters copyright; its copyright "clock" only begins when someone publishes it. So e.g. the diary of Anne Frank doesn't have a copyright year of 1945, but rather 1947—the year it was found and published. Until then, the work is a "manuscript", equivalent in IP rights status to a draft laying on a writer's desk destined for a publisher. You can think of such a manuscript as a secret root node in a "derivative work" tree: the author creates work A [the manuscript], the publisher derives work B [the published book], the author assigns work-A derivative-work rights to the publisher, and then also [usually] relinquishes all rights to work A. Because of this, the copyright clock is relative to work B, not work A. If copyright stayed attached to manuscripts, you could run out the copyright [in a pre-Disney copyright regime] by just spending 30 years writing a book! |
This isn't really true in the U.S. AFAICT - unpublished works do enter the public domain, 120 years after creation. It is true elsewhere, e.g. in Europe, but the standard for publication is lower than you might expect; if one can argue that the work wasn't genuinely private to the author (e.g. copies were made, it was used for public performances, etc.) that's enough to consider it "published".