The little idea hamster started spinning this afternoon.
I’ve never believed that taking an old translation and tweaking it is the answer to the Open Source crisis for Portuguese Bibles. Open Source is an ideal but I think there is a reasonable compromise when the best translations aren’t being shared: offline browsing.
The legality of this method seems pretty clear. In Universal City Studios, Inc. et al. v. Sony Corporation of America Inc. et al. (See here for more on the so-called Betamax Case) it was judged that copying TV programming for later viewing did not infringe on copyrights. I believe that the viewing offline versions of online Bibles is a similar situation.
The concept goes like this: Bible publishers have put their Bibles on the Internet so that people can view them any time they please. What about someone who wants to read Ezekiel but knows they are going to be on a submarine? That person could use an offline downloader and then look at Ezekiel while not connected to the Internet. Now take it a step farther and ask this question, “What if my friend is on the same submarine and he wants to read Ezekiel too?” Is that still legal? Or what if we say, “We’ve got an electronic library in our submarine and we want to put Ezekiel on the network so that all our seamen can read Ezekiel.” The information has not been modified in any way. It has been shared in the same way that it was made available by the copyright holder.
That submarine is essentially analogous to the situation in the third world. The rest of the world has access to a huge library of online resources that people in poorer and less-connected parts of the world don’t. The solution is not to give them hand-me-downs such as old public-domain translations. In fact, I think we owe our brothers and sisters in Christ in the developing world the best translations since they have less ability to access resources that will help explain a poor or archaic translation.
One way to do that is to save online resources for offline browsing and share those with people in the submarine. The resources are already being made available electronically for those that can access them online. Offline browsing acts as a stop-gap until better resources are available.
Note: You can stop reading here unless you’d like to know about the nuts-and-bolts of downloading for offline reading.
The process of creating an offline repository might look something like this:
- Visit website where you can view the Bible
- Use software to save all the pages for later viewing
- View the pages offline and share with others using removable media
I have experimented with several resources for creating offline repositories of online information.
Windows Software
Offline downloader: Irritating registration message
Website downloader: Too primitive
Offline Explorer: I haven’t tried it but it’s widely recommended
Firefox Addons
Read It Later: I haven’t played with it much
Scrapbook: On the page you want to save, click on Scrapbook > Capture Page As > Depth to follow links 1
Using Scrapbook to create offline repositories of Biblical texts
For my trial, I used the O Livro version of the Bible in Portuguese at Bible Gateway: http://www.biblegateway.com/versions/?action=getVersionInfo&vid=37
I began the download at 2:55PM and finished at 4:48PM. The whole Bible is 60MB.
Scrapbook created a shortcut accessible from the Scrapbook menu and rewrote all the links to the offline location.
Next, I copied the entire contents of that folder to a Flash drive and opened it up on my sons’ computer.
It loads fine but I discovered that there is no navigation between chapters so I have to return to the homepage each time. A better alternative would be the mobile version which does have chapter navigation at the bottom of each page.
Some questions:
- How could you search through a directory of html pages and get meaningful results when the pages are offline?
- How could you create a concordance of an offline repository of a Bible?
I look forward to hearing from others on how this strategy might alleviate the lack of quality Scriptures in Portuguese in those places where online access is difficult or impossible.
I have a very strong memory that while saving a broadcast for one later period is not illegal, just about everything else is–even for video tapes. Saving and still keeping it for a later date after the first viewing, and saving and sharing with a friend are both No-No’s. And actually publishing it as widely as is constituted by the submarine network…OOPS.
Of course you could hold to the idea that Bible translations should be free of copyright, and decide that since it shouldn’t be you’ll treat it as though it isn’t, even though it does exist and you’re breaking it. Your call.
I’m pretty sure you’re right. But I would like to find some information on the rights we assign to others when we publish things on the web. For example, this page is not stored in a cache on your computer. If you view that later offline we assume you haven’t done anything wrong.