On Wed, Sep 24, 2014 at 9:55 PM, Vishnu <visdaviva@gmail.com> wrote:

Dear Ravi,

On the copyright question AFAIK... it is the manner in which a certain content is expressed (e.g. analyzed, compiled, paginated, represented, etc..) the author could claim copyright, as there is a certain basic amount of creative labour that went into it. So Govt. of Karnataka could rightfully copyright these works, which it has now released under CC-BY-SA 3.0. A useful thing to read in this context would be this [1].

As Ravi pointed 11th Century Kannada literature is already public domain . There is no point in re-licensing it as CC-BY-SA .

Digitization does not create fresh copyright . While thanking Govt for their efforts to make it available , please dont create fresh copyright on it . And while looking at details, There was no point of time in which govt of Karanataka had copyright on this content .

This effort is almost in same lines of Open access initiative of rare public domain books by Kerala Sahitya academy happened almost same time last year (http://www.keralasahityaakademi.org/online_library/index.html) . They havnt claimed any undeserving copyright on these books . SO it is better if people involved canm correct Govt of Karanataka at this point itself showing kerala example to avoid further ambiguities surrounding license .

~ regards

Anivar