Hello Friends,
I’m a monk at Throssel Hole Buddhist Abbey, in the north of the U.K., and I’m currently compiling a descriptive catalogue of Buddhist literary texts translated into English. This includes texts written in Pali of course, though it also includes translations from Sanskrit, Tibetan, Chinese etc…so it’s quite a long list!
For each translation I am of course including the identity of the copyright holder, which for the excellent translations made so generously available here, is the website of Suttacentral. I’m also choosing to provide basic information about the location of the copyright holder - I think it does help the general reader to know roughly where in the world (and under what academic freedoms) a translation has been made.
I appreciate that Suttacentral is located in Australia, but would I have authorisation to describe Suttacentral as located in Sydney, Australia? Or another city? I think the country alone is a little too imprecise…but maybe that’s just me?
I’m not quite sure who I’m asking here…but I don’t need absolute authority, just a hint…actually even the Australian state would be okay.
Thanks, Lambert
(Rev. Lambert Tuffrey)
Welcome to the forum!
I hope you don’t mind that I changed your post title to be more descriptive of your inquiry. (BTW, it’s not nosy at all!)
I think Bhante @sujato will have to answer. There is actually an ongoing question, I believe, if all of the segmented translations on SuttaCentral will necessarily list SuttaCentral as the copyright, e.g. those translations by Ven. @sabbamitta and @noeismet.
BTW, are you aware of this document?
The refrence table there may be much more extensive than you are looking for, but it still may be of interest.
As I understand it, SuttaCentral is not the copyright holder, but there is actually no copyright holder. From the “i” section of a translation by Bhante Sujato (my own translations have the same statement in German):
License
Creative Commons Zero ( CC0 )
To the extent possible under law, Bhikkhu Sujato has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to Middle Discourses. This work is published from Australia.About this license
This translation is an expression of an ancient spiritual text that has been passed down by the Buddhist tradition for the benefit of all sentient beings. It is dedicated to the public domain via Creative Commons Zero (CC0). You are encouraged to copy, reproduce, adapt, alter, or otherwise make use of this translation. The translator respectfully requests that any use be in accordance with the values and principles of the Buddhist community.
SuttaCentral is the publisher, so do I understand, but not the copyright holder.
Yes, actually, I should clarify… For each translation you will need to click on the (i) icon to see what the actual copyright is. Some texts have strict copyright and some (as Ven. Sabbimitta pointed out) have none. For example, the Vimanavatthu translations by Ven. Gnanananda have this copyright:
BTW, if you are looking for complete translations of the Vimanavatthu and Petavatthu, you can find them on SuttaFriends.org.
Thanks for asking! There’s already a few helpful answers here.
Interesting. Please do keep us updated on this, I’m sure we’d love to know where such a resource is.
Sure, why not, that’s where our main activity is located. We’ve always been a distributed organization so we don’t have an office or anything.
But yeah, SuttaCentral is located here, but our translations come from all over. If it’s the translations we have made ourselves, they are uniformly under CC0. For legacy translations, they have a variety of formal and informal permissions allowing us to use them. You’ll never be able to classify them all, so perhaps a notice like this:
SuttaCentral (Sydney, Australia). Translations commissioned by SuttaCentral are freed from copyright via CC0, while legacy translations are published with permission under a variety of licences.