Copyright-free texts of koten sources

[Chris Kern]

Hi all,

This is perhaps a followup to a post I made some time ago about copyright issues with doing 翻刻 of manuscripts.

There may be times when we want to include an original text for some piece of koten -- some examples of this are the texts given in Haruo Shirane's classical reader, quoting poems, or some kind of digital humanities project. How should this be done without running into potential copyright issues?

The classical reader apparently reproduces texts from the 日本古典文学大系 but I'm not sure what process was used to secure the rights to those texts. If it's just a small number of poems you may be able to simply copy an edition's text without getting into trouble, but if you want to do an entire poetry collection you can't just copy the 新編国歌大観 text from Japan Knowledge or the koten library. Of course we can make our own transcription/edited version from public domain sources (or use a public domain 校訂本文 like the older Kokka Taikan), but this adds an additional layer of work.

For Genji we have Eiichi Shibuya's texts that he allows for reproduction (although his site is old enough that I don't think he actually uses an official license of any kind). The poetry collections have texts on Wikisource which are claimed to be public domain but they seem to be copied from the Nichibunken database (https://lapis.nichibun.ac.jp/waka/index_era.html) and I'm not sure what the copyright status of those texts is -- looking at the Gosenshu it's clear that the texts are based on the manuscripts that started being used as 底本 in the 1980s rather than the older 流布本 editions, so it seems like whoever made those could claim copyright over their edited transcription.

Sorry for the somewhat long post, but I am grateful for any advice on this issue.

Sincerely,

-Chris Kern, Auburn University

[Chris Kern]

As a quick followup to my own post, I did finally see a place on the Nichibunken site where it says everything is copyrighted and cannot be reproduced. I'm not sure whether Wikisource is simply ignoring this and claiming the texts are public domain because the works themselves are in the public domain, or whether they got some kind of permission to reproduce the texts.

-Chris