Re: License Islamic Holy material

[Nadim Shaikli <shaikli at yahoo dot com>]

--- Abdalla Alothman <abdalla at pheye dot net> wrote:
> But consider the Quran, what can you possibly do with the Quran
> that comes with  a license and how will that usage differ from the
> unlicensed version? In your analogy (which we have trimmed down
> from the Great Wall to a car to show how a "thing" is being used)
> there's a difference between the car and its picture, or the wall and
> its picture. But what will be the difference in usage between the
> unlicensed and a licensed version of the Quran?

I see a number of issues both practical and philosophical (or principled
at least) being noted.  A brief search on the 'net reveals that a number
of people and organizations out there protect and license various
"bibles" differently - I won't bore you with links (you can do that
for yourself) but I will offer one link just for grins [1].  From what
I saw anything goes out there and I by _no_ means am advocating anything
similar, far from it.  What we need to consider is our open license
(free software) mantra.  If we revert a step or two back and think about
licensing in general it won't be too hard to conclude that licenses are
all about access - restrictions, usage models, etc.  With regard to the
Quran, hadith and tafsir (akin to Ibn Kathir, et al) they couldn't be
more open in the sense of access - they all exist entirely for people
to read, inspect and learn from (they are all meant to be available for
everyone for _free_).  The kink in all of this is modification and one
can argue that you can either put a label on the work to say "YOU WILL
NOT MODIFY" in hopes of scaring people from doing so since court action
can be called for or you can say we will protect the data ourselves
via noting what is being produced by us (checksums, hashsums, etc) and
leave it be.  Both ideas have merit and both, IMHO, should be pursued
at the proper time, more below.

What concerns me and what I'll note below are the practical implications
of what _we_ are working on and what we are concerned about.

Beyond the Quran, which we seem to have the text and possibly a complete
font that can display it properly (no ?) is the various hadith and
tafsir out there - getting access to that data is my concern at this
point.  In order for us to get those in electronic format we'd either,

 1. Get someone (an author of a publication of some sort) to
    donate an electronic copy for open source consumption.
 2. Get a number of people to actually type-up the material
    (ie. start from zero).
 3. We cut-n-paste what is out there (from various websites)
    and have people validate its content either based on source
    and/or personal knowledge.

I'm pretty certain that #1 won't happen (it hasn't happened with anything
else so far in our community) and I'm pretty certain no one is willing to
do #2 unless money (ie. employment) is involved which renders the option
useless in regard to our grass-roots project which leaves us with #3.  So
now there are licensing issues and here I'll extrapolate a bit in saying
that whomever has this data on the 'net is looking to dispense the data
as much as possible.  In other words, any website with hadith/tafsir
material out there is meant to do one thing and one thing only and that
is to educate.  So given the website is not looking to profit from this
(ie. they're not selling books or seminars, etc) one can argue that
in-principle they should have no issue with us cut-n-past'ing their
material given we retain its content.  Again, if anyone of us had such
a site and we were asked if someone out there could use it for their own
project the only thought that most (well I) would have is "only if you
will guarantee me that the data won't be modified AT ALL".  With that said
I'm semi-certain that most places would say NO to us using their material
since they have no idea who we are and have no trust in our intentions
and/or plans (again put yourself in their shoes and follow your own thought
pattern).  Along the same lines, what do you think they would say if we
told them we'll take your website pages and put them on a CD/DVD to hand
out to people (with you supervising and inspecting all the data written),
I'm sure they'd leap a the idea - again my position is that the data is
on those sites in order to dispense it to as large a number of people as
possible and if we help along those lines then the site maintainers should
have no issue with us using data off of their websites.

I'm sure people will find fault with this reasoning and I myself can come
up with a number of counter examples that would refute the above but remove
money from the equation and I think we'll all agree on what's noted.  Again
the point is "what do we do _now_ to get access to hadith and tafsir ?" and
later "how do we protect this data - either in terms of integrity or in
terms of user-information (ie. licensing vs. checksum/hash) ?"

> It wont solve any problem at all. A license will not stop a malicious person
> from adding, deleting, or modifying the Quran if he or she wants to. But a
> message digest would tell us if something like that ever happens even if
> it is a space (deleted, inserted, or substituted). A license expects a person
> with a good will on the other side of the agreement; people who want to
> malign a certain piece of work usually do not have a good will to respect
> the license.

Agreed 100% - a "modify-restriction" license could potentially give you
legal ground to pursue someone and in turn could potentially sway people
from adversely touching your material.

Thoughts ?

[1]http://wbtc.convio.net/site/PageServer?pagename=License_Agreement_for_Bible_Texts

Salam.

 - Nadim


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