Legality of translation

"The law binds those who suffer from it no less than those to whom it is favorable." - F. Gentz

Translation difficulties

Habrahabr regularly publishes translations of articles, news, book chapters; sometimes there are announcements of completed translations of useful books under open licenses. Whether you are a translator or a reader, most of you will agree - it is very difficult to achieve the ideal when translating - this is an inevitable fact. It is not surprising that at one time, Goethe said: “Translators are the same matchmakers: they sing the beauty of a woman, glorify her virtues and cause an irresistible passion for the original.” In turn, if you take into account the attitude of IT specialists to translated books on a computer theme, you can hear such a phrase (and maybe even you yourself said it to someone) that the first programmer's language should be English. But in reality, not everything is as bad as it may seem, and all this should not detract from the value of translations for the Russian IT community in particular, and for the growth of the country's economy as a whole, since the more available sources of knowledge provide more opportunities for growth of the intellectual potential of the population.



In light of the different events that make the Copyright hub (formerly called Dura Lex) swell more and more, translators, in addition to the translation philosophy, should also take into account the more pragmatic aspect of translation - copyright.



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Where is your passion?

A small digression. A few months ago, I translated the chapters of the book “The Passion for Programming” by Chad Fowler. For me, this is a very significant book, and I am very grateful to its author and sincerely want that any Russian reader have the opportunity to read it from cover to cover. Yes, you can easily buy it, but not everyone owns such a level of English to read in the original language and, most importantly, to correctly understand what is written. After a small correspondence with Chad, he indirectly agreed to the translation, but only those chapters of the book, which are laid out in his blog. Several translations were made, then other translators were brought up. In order to somehow speed up the process of the appearance of the full version of the book in Russian, I sent a request to one large publishing house for the translation of the book. They have more resources and they will definitely be able to find translators who will make a decent translation, but they never answered me. It is possible that in a few years the translation of this book in Russian will appear. But people do not wait, and new translated chapters from time to time continue to appear on Habré.



Recently, another translation appeared . Its author contacted me with the proposal to organize the translation of the book in full. Of course, he had a question about the legality of this event, since from his words some of the translators of past chapters began to remove translations into drafts, since this is a violation of copyright. When I started to write him an answer, I decided to sort out the issue in more detail, it became clear that the topic was quite scrupulous and deserved a collective discussion, since we are publishing translations here, reading and adding them to your favorites, I would not want one The moment one of them disappeared due to problems with legality.

Guaranteed rights

I will immediately say that I do not have the appropriate legal education and I will make my conclusions based on publicly available information and the small amount of information about jurisprudence that we were given at the university. If you find an inaccuracy in interpretation, please report it so that I can make the necessary corrections.



In the RF Law "On Copyright" , in article 1274 "Free use of a work for informational, scientific, educational or cultural purposes" is the second paragraph, which gives the green light to free transfers of books.

Allowed without the consent of the author or other copyright holder and without payment of remuneration, but with the obligatory indication of the name of the author whose work is used, and the source of borrowing:

[...]

2) the use of legally published works and excerpts from them as illustrations in publications, in radio and television programs, audio and video recordings of an educational nature in the amount justified by the goal;

My interpretation of this clause is that it is possible to provide any translated works to the Russian reader for educational purposes free of charge. That is, we can easily make translations of any foreign texts into Russian in any volumes and publish them on the Internet. To ensure that a translation is always free to access, it must be published under a non-commercial license, for example, Creative Commons BY-NC-SA, additionally identifying the author of the original and the source.



In particular, under the terms of the agreement with the user, Habrahabr receives only a non-exclusive license to use the published materials, so we can do anything with our translation here, including distribute it under the CC BY-NC-SA license. For greater purity of thoughts when publishing the translation, it is necessary to clearly indicate that the material is distributed only for educational purposes.

Dilemma

Due to the fact that I am not a specialist in the field of jurisprudence, I still have one open question. I hope someone stronger in legal matters will tell. In all the books in the same “Passionate Programmer” there is a similar text:

All rights are reserved.

It has been given that it can be used in electronic form.

This is contrary to what I described earlier - the opportunity to distribute the translated work for free. Googling, I found that federal laws have a higher priority over various user agreements, but, unfortunately, I could not find the corresponding regulatory document. If you know the relevant normative act (or a clause of the Constitution), determining the priorities of the laws, inform in the comments or through messages.



Yes, in the piece from the law above there is a phrase “as illustrations ... in the volume justified by the goal”. In this regard, several questions also arise. Is the purpose of publishing the translation in full enough legitimate to provide access to information to people who are not native English speakers? Can a work in full be an “illustration”?



PS I hope that you will understand me correctly. I respect the authors and regularly buy books for my Kindle on Amazon, sometimes I buy paper publications. This entire initiative is only to clarify the translation process and provide access to information that is unknown when it will appear in Russian officially.



UPD: Oh, here the first minuses flew into the topic and into karma. :) In principle, it is understandable and I even expected that the topic would be accepted ambiguously, saddened by the fact that there are no comments on this issue ... But still I will decide to leave the topic published, if only for the fact that the question of the legality of published translations needs constructive discussion .



UPD 2: My thoughts from the article, as it turned out, are not viable enough. In the first comment from edogs you can read where I went too far . But I still think that the dialogue was a success, and at least I learned a lot for myself. Thanks to everyone who participates in the discussion.