The Open Siddur Project » digitization

Free as in Freedom

Aharon Varady — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 20:23:10 +0000

Often we are asked here at the Open Siddur Project why we cannot simply use the digitized texts of the siddur that are available from Davka Corporation. Our instinct was that Davka only granted permission for individuals to use their digitized Hebrew texts under fair use doctrine. To be certain, we sought to find the the text of Davka Corporation’s End User License Agreement (EULA) and failing to locate this information online, friends of the project provided us with the EULA included with the packaging and software installer for a Davka software product: DavkaWriter Dimensions II.

From the language of these license agreements, it is clear that the text Davka is providing is not free for end-users to distribute or to create derivative works. Section 4(a) of the EULA reads: “You may not use the texts in the software to publish materials for sale without express written permission from Davka Corporation. Preparation of these texts has entailed considerable effort and expense. They are not shareware, and should be used by no one other than the purchaser.”

In stark contrast, the texts that the Open Siddur is sharing may be distributed and re-distributed without our express written permission, for commercial and non-commercial, for educational and non-educational use. In short, our texts are FREE. We are making these texts free because we believe that these texts are the cultural legacy and inheritance of the Jewish people to create and innovate with in the publishing of new siddurim customized to an individual or groups spiritual practice. We have so much to share with each other, why should we limit our culture vitality by shackling it to copyright?

There are other reasons why we would not use the digitized texts of contemporary siddurim. The most important reason besides their not being free, is that they do not clearly attribute the source of their digitized texts to the historical siddurim that they were presumably derived from. The Open Siddur Project aims to provide the text of all the nusḥaot of the siddur and their variations with full attribution of the sources for these texts.

The following is the text of the License Agreement (pdf) included in the packaging of the DavkaWriter Dimensions II CD:

Licensing Agreement

The files on this program are licensed to the purchaser on an “as-is” basis. While the publishers have made every effort to avoid errors, they will not be held responsible for any loss or damage, incidental or consequential, resulting directly or indirectly from the use of this program. In any case, the sole and total liability of the publishers shall not exceed the sum paid for the program by the purchaser. The texts on this CD may be used by the purchaser for personal or family use. If the purchaser is an institution, the texts may be used by that institution for its own needs. However, any use of the texts in the publication of materials for sale requires written permission from the Davka Corporation. Preparation of DavkaWriter Dimensions has entailed considerable effort and expense. It is not shareware, and therefore should not be used other than by the purchaser.

The following is the EULA included with the software installer and must be agreed to (via click-through) before the software allows itself to be installed.

END-USER LICENSE AGREEMENT FOR DAVKAWRITER DIMENSIONS

IMPORTANT-READ CAREFULLY: This End-User License Agreement (the “Agreement”) is a legal agreement between you, either an individual or a single entity, (the “Licensee”) and the Institute for Computers in Jewish Life, Davka Corporation, and David Kantrowitz (the “Publishers”) for the DavkaWriter Dimensions software product, which includes computer software, truetype font files, textual documents, associated media and printed materials, and “online” or electronic documentation (the “SOFTWARE”).

By installing, copying, or otherwise using the SOFTWARE, you agree to be bound by the terms of this Agreement. If you do not agree to the terms of this Agreement, promptly return the unused SOFTWARE to the place from which you obtained it for a full refund.

The SOFTWARE is protected by copyright laws and international copyright treaties, as well as other intellectual property laws and treaties. The SOFTWARE is licensed, not sold.

1. GRANT OF LICENSE. This Agreement grants you the right to use one copy of the SOFTWARE on a single computer.

The SOFTWARE is in “use” on a computer when it is loaded into temporary memory (i.e., RAM) or installed into permanent memory (e.g., hard disk, CD-ROM, or other storage device) of that computer. However, installation on a network server for the sole purpose of internal distribution to one or more other computer(s) shall not constitute “use” for which a separate Agreement is required, provided you have a separate Agreement for each computer to which the SOFTWARE is distributed.

THE LICENSE IS LIMITED TO THE PROVISIONS OF THE REST OF THIS AGREEMENT, ESPECIALLY THOSE IN ITEM 4 BELOW.

2. UPGRADES. The SOFTWARE includes an upgrade to the DavkaWriter Platinum program, produced by Davka Corporation. This upgrade may be used ONLY by a licensed user of the DavkaWriter Platinum program. The DavkaWriter Platinum upgrade may NOT be separated from this SOFTWARE for use by another individual or entity. It may be used only in accordance with this Agreement.

3. COPYRIGHT. All title and copyrights in and to the SOFTWARE (including but not limited to any images, photographs, animations, video, audio, music, text, and “applets” incorporated into the SOFTWARE), the accompanying printed materials, and any copies of the SOFTWARE are owned by Davka Corporation or its suppliers.

The SOFTWARE is protected by copyright laws and international treaty provisions. Therefore, you must treat the SOFTWARE like any other copyrighted material except that you may either (a) make one copy of the SOFTWARE solely for backup or archival purposes or (b) install the SOFTWARE on a single computer provided you keep the original solely for backup or archival purposes. You may not copy the printed materials accompanying the SOFTWARE.

4. DESCRIPTION OF OTHER RIGHTS AND LIMITATIONS.

a. YOU MAY NOT USE THE TEXTS IN THE SOFTWARE TO PUBLISH MATERIALS FOR SALE WITHOUT EXPRESS WRITTEN PERMISSION FROM DAVKA CORPORATION. PREPARATION OF THESE TEXTS HAS ENTAILED CONSIDERABLE EFFORT AND EXPENSE. THEY ARE NOT SHAREWARE, AND SHOULD BE USED BY NO ONE OTHER THAN THE PURCHASER.

b. Limitations on Reverse Engineering, Decompilation, and Disassembly. You may not reverse engineer, decompile, or disassemble the SOFTWARE, except and only to the extent that such activity is expressly permitted by applicable law notwithstanding this limitation.

c. No Separation of Components. The SOFTWARE is licensed as a single product and neither the software SOFTWAREs comprising the SOFTWARE or any UPDATE may be separated for use by more than one user at a time.

d. Rental. You may not rent, lease, or lend the SOFTWARE.

e. Software Transfer. You may permanently transfer all of your rights under this Agreement, provided that you retain no copies, you transfer all of the SOFTWARE (including all component parts, the media and printed materials, any upgrades, and this Agreement), and the recipient agrees to the terms of this Agreement. If the SOFTWARE is an upgrade, any transfer must include all prior versions of the SOFTWARE.
The SOFTWARE must be completely removed from your computer before transfering it to the recipient.

f. Termination. Without prejudice to any other rights, the Publishers may terminate this Agreement if you fail to comply with the terms and conditions of this Agreement. In such event, you must destroy all copies of the SOFTWARE.

5. EXCLUSION OF WARRANTIES.

The Publishers offer the SOFTWARE and the Licensee accepts it “AS IS”. The Publishers do not warrant the SOFTWARE will meet the Licensee’s requirements or will operate uninterrupted or error-free.
TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW, THE PUBLISHERS AND THEIR SUPPLIERS DISCLAIM ALL WARRANTIES, EITHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, AND NONINFRINGEMENT.

CUSTOMER REMEDIES. The Publishers’ and their suppliers’ entire liability and the Licensee’s exclusive remedy shall be, at the Publishers’ option, either (a) return of the price paid by the Licensee, or (b) repair or replacement of SOFTWARE or hardware that is defective and which is returned to Davka Corporation with a copy of the Licensee’s receipt.
All Warranties are void if failure of the SOFTWARE or hardware has resulted from accident, abuse, or misapplication. Outside the United States, neither these remedies nor any product support services offered by Davka Corporation are available without proof of purchase from an authorized international source.

TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW, IN NO EVENT SHALL THE PUBLISHERS OR THEIR SUPPLIERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL, INDIRECT, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES WHATSOEVER (INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, DAMAGES FOR LOSS OF BUSINESS PROFITS, BUSINESS INTERRUPTION, LOSS OF BUSINESS INFORMATION, OR ANY OTHER PECUNIARY LOSS) ARISING OUT OF THE USE OF OR INABILITY TO USE THE SOFTWARE, EVEN IF THE PUBLISHERS HAVE BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.

Some states and jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion or limitation of certain implied warranties or the exclusion or limitation of liability for incidental or consequential damages, in which case and to the extent such exclusion or limitation is not allowed, some of the foregoing limitations and exclusions may not apply to the Licensee.
To the extent allowed by applicable law, implied warranties on the SOFTWARE and hardware, if any, are limited to ninety (90) days and one year, respectively.

Pirate Siddurim vs. Open Siddurim

Aharon Varady — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 07:51:09 +0000

Culture hacking either respects copyright or ignores it. One of the pillars of the Open Siddur is its respect of copyright and its attempt to make available a digitized repository of Siddur content that is available for editing, mashups, and remixing, i.e., “derivative works” that may be redistributed without restriction.

For example, we want you to have the freedom to take the nusaḥ Ashkenaz, borrow kavanot from the nusaḥ sfard, and piyyutim (liturgical poetry) from the nusaḥ Roman; add and edit existing translations of familiar psalms and contribute and share your own translation of obscure piyyutim; share the pdf you build at Open Siddur and give it to an artist to apply an even more beautiful layout than the one we provide; and even redistribute the siddur commercially.

To make this previous example a reality, the Open Siddur is committed to only using copyright permissive licenses for our core siddur content that permit the generation of non-commercial and commercially derivative works. Copyright permissive licenses that allow this include CC0, CC-BY, and CC-BY-SA. Licenses that conflict with this objective include copyleft licenses such as the GNU Free Document License (GFDL) and CC-BY-NC-SA. (We envision that users of our siddur building tool will be able to choose the license under which they wish to share their content.)

For example, a number of siddurim are available digitally at the Hebrew language site of wikisource, a sister of the wikipedia project. Up until mid-2009, creative work on wikisource was shared with the GFDL license. Because the GFDL was incompatibile with other copyleft licenses like the CC-BY-SA, we weren’t able to incorporate wikisource work in our project until wikisource changed its licensing policy.

If this sounds frustrating and absurd given that the authors of these piyyutim and tehillim could hardly imagine the publishing and intellectual property restrictions of the 20th and 21st centuries, it is. The fact remains that copyright is applied to the digitization of text and that includes the imaging/scanning, as well as the manual or automated (OCR) transcription of the text.

Why, you ask, can’t we simply cut and paste these digitized siddurim and simply ignore copyright restrictions. Why indeed? I am quite certain that other online siddur projects have done this and may even currently be doing this with a laissez faire attitude towards the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works (1886), the Universal Copyright Convention (1955), and the World Intellectual Property Organization Copyright Treaty (1996) just to name a few of the relevant international intellectual property laws. To make certain, that our content is as free and open (really, in a sense, liberated) as culture within this legal environment we have endeavored to ensure all our core content is transcribed from works in the free cultural commons (e.g. the public domain).

To do otherwise would frankly be much simpler… and thus, faster, especially for an ambitious project such as the Open Siddur and its sister, the Jewish Liturgy project. To do so, however, we would probably have to change our name to the Pirate Siddur, just to keep things honest.

As tempting as this strategy is, the developers of the Open Siddur that the sustainability of this project as a platform for the creation of new cultural products within Judaism depends on our respect and awareness of the current restrictions on copyright and copyleft licensed works. We want the siddur to be Free as in Freedom, unencumbered, and unhassled.

In our minds, this is a great act of loving-kindness (and gives us all a great big Mitzvah-rush!). But besides this, awareness of copyright licensing is essential for a project that envisions itself as a cultural platform for as yet unimagined projects that will add value to the project and programs of Judaism in general.

Digitizing Siddurim

Aharon Varady — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 14:33:55 +0000

One of the enduring challenges of the Open Siddur and its sister, the Jewish Liturgy Project, has been acquiring digitized siddur content that is in the public domain (or which is at least distributed with a very permissive copyright license such as CC-BY-SA). Our greatest advance so far been attaining a digitized copyleft version of the Leningrad Codex of the TaNaḤ (in XML).

Given that over 50% of the siddur is sourced in the TaNaḤ, and since it can be referenced chapter and verse by XML, our digitization efforts for the core content of the siddur can be considered over 50% complete. To obtain the rest from siddurim in the public domain, we either need an excellent Hebrew OCR program, or a large team of (hopefully crowdsourced) transcribers. Both methods will require a rigorous quality control process.

However, there’s yet another more obvious alternative to the digitization challenge: finding siddurim that have already been digitized by others. Since arriving in Jerusalem last Wednesday I’ve already been clued to three digital siddurim available on the web (in Ashkenazi, Sefardi, and Mizrachi nusḥaot). I am hopeful that their likely owner–the people responsible for digitizing the text at the DAAT project–will be agreeable to contributing them with a permissive license that will allow the Open Siddur to create a derivative XML encoded text from them.

One might ask why the content of the siddur isn’t free from copyright to begin with. Well, it is in a sense–all work published prior to 1923 is considered to be in the Public Domain. But copyright is applied even to transcribed texts so unless the publisher has consented to their digital transcription having a permissive copyleft license (some rights reserved), it is protected copyright (all rights reserved). So, projects like the Open Siddur that seek to work creatively with Jewish culture must work cooperatively to liberate the legacy of Jewish culture and tradition from the current restrictive climate determined by intellectual property law.

For those of us interested in working with Jewish texts, the idea others claiming copyright on our foundational sourcetexts, digitized or not, seems like an absurdity. We enliven the works of our ancestors by studying their teachings, and meditating on and singing with their prayers. The inspired author or authors of these works gave their work freely to the Jewish people and to the world. All the tradition demands is correct attribution, as is taught in the Pirkei Avot chapter 6:6,

התורה נקנית בערבעים ושמונה דברים. ואלו הן: (….) והאומר דבר בשם אומרו. הא למדת כל-האומר דבר בשם אומרו מביא גאלה לעולם, שנאמר “ותאמר אסתר למלך בשם מרדכי

… the Torah is acquired by means of forty-eight qualities, which are: (.…) [and lastly] what the student has heard from others she will quote in the name of him of whom she has heard it. For so you have learned: He who quotes something in the name of the person who said it brings deliverance to the world. For it is said: “And Esther said to the King in the name of Mordechai.” [emphasis mine]

R. Samson Raphael Hersh comments:

[A student] is careful to absorb and repeat accurately what they have heard from others and will never pass off as their own what others have told them.