Re: The Provinances of the Roman Empire
- From: goopfic@[redacted]
- Subject: Re: The Provinances of the Roman Empire
- Date: Thu, 19 Jan 2006 11:00:20 -0500 (EST)
On Wed, 18 Jan 2006 Haradda@[redacted] wrote:
> I just came across something that is starting to make my blood boil. I was
> looking through the final close outs of books that Barnes and Noble puts on
> this time of year. And I found The Provinces of the Roman Empire by Theodor
> Mommsen, translated by W.P. Dickson in 1885 and updated in 1909 by
> F. Haverfield. It appears that Macmillian published it in 1909. Some people
> have thought that the English translation wasn't very good because a new
> translation was done in the 1990's. Some people have called this the fifth
> volume in Mommsen's History of Rome. But the text is different from the
> fifth volume of Mommsen's History of Rome that has been supplied on the web
> by Project Gutenberg. So this is a completely different work. Anyway Barnes
> and Noble are claiming a copyright to this edition. I have been doing a
> comparison between the 1909 Macmillian edition and so far I haven't found
> any differences between the two. I have talked to the copyright lawyer
> for Barnes and Noble and he says that "everything they publish even
> reprints of older public domain works are copyrighted by them". I said
> "I .really don't think that you can do so legally." The conversation
> deteriorated from that point on. Does anyone have any knowledge
> about this in reguard to its copyright status?
The Barnes & Noble reprint I happen to have here on my desk (H. G. Wells'
Outline of World History; as published in 1920) doesn't include a claim of
copyright over anything but the introduction and suggested reading
sections that were the original works of B&N. Just a data point.
--Mark