Re: quran license

[Nadim Shaikli <shaikli at yahoo dot com>]

--- Mohammad DAMT <md at mt dot web dot id> wrote:
> Finally our lawyer friend Erwin Sundoro <sundoro at hotmail dot com> 
> suggested an addendum to LGPL and disclaimer for libquran and data 

Great - its always nice to have a lawyer friend :-)

> files. He said that Quran can't be licensed as nobody is holding it's 
> copyright. And a license can't be published if there is no copyright. 
> Even if the data files are translation of the original text, since a 
> translation can be considered as a derivative work of the original text.
> 
> If there's no license we can't put restrictions in data files. One of 
> his idea is to provide a "certified" data files. We can use GPG or 
> simply MD5 hash to make a data file certified. The GPG signature or MD5 
> then published in Quran section in Arabeyes website. If data files 
> installed in user's computer are not having same signature/hash then we 
> (Arabeyes) are not responsible for that copy.

I really have no comments on the license (or addition thereof) as I'm sure
there are lots of people more capable than I in this field.  One related
comment.  Walid, M.Yousif and I (to some degree) have been trying to contact
qurancomplex.org to see if we can use some of their translations and in one
of our conversations the topic of using MD5 came up and we kinda thought of
the following.  Instead of Arabeyes hosting any of the translations (or the
actual Arabic Quran), we should simply point people to where they can
download them from.  For instance, if we can get qurancomplex.org to meet us
half way, they can supply us with say an english translation XML file (per
whatever format you guys deem acceptable), we'd then generate an MD5
fingerprint.  Once that fingerprint is gotten, we embed that info into the
Quran library (in binary format) so that the program would only open
pre-defined and agreed-upon fingerprinted data.  That would then render the
"where did you get the data from" question immaterial (as long as the MD5
message digests match, it doesn't matter).

As I'm not sure what has transpired with our contact with qurancomplex
(Walid/M.Yousif could you please give us an update - is qurancomplex now
aware of how serious we are about this ?), I'm not sure how best to proceed
as we're back to the original problem at hand - where to get non-tampered
with data from ?

Salam and sorry to get off topic a bit.

 - Nadim

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