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(:nl:)'''EDITORIAL - Copyrighting Don Bosco!'''

Two recent experiences, one this week, the other now a year old, have highlighted an issue for me that the 'open' world has been giving considerable thought to. A year ago, a Salesian past pupil shopping in a bookstore in Toronto was horrified to discover what seemed to be Don Bosco on the front cover of a novel, surrounded by flames, pitchfork in hand! Fearing the worst kind of attack on his favourite Saint and his love for all that Don Bosco stands for, he contacted us here in Rome, asking that the matter be investigated. We took it up and it turned out to be innocent in intent - the author, with his publisher, had found the image in a store, liked the face and the clerical getup, and wanted it for the cover of a novel about the old theme of sin and redemption but played out this time by a pastor who got mixed up in dubious deals, and so on and so forth. The author claimed not to have known who the image represented in real life and readily apologised if any offence might have been caused. Back here, there were some who thought we should be 'copyrighting' Don Bosco, whatever that could mean! The other experience, much more homespun, came from an item I published in austraLasia, and a number of confreres asking legitimate questions about the authorship of the item referred to and wondering whether correct attribution was being given to all players.

What is copyright? There are simple enough legal answers to that, but not everybody knows exactly what copyright means other than that it is meant to protect creator's rights (authors, artists and the like). When it comes to copyright people bandy around the phrase 'intellectual property' sometimes a little carelessly, as if there is some sort of common principle binding things like copyright, trademarks, patents together. There isn't. They are vastly different things. Copyright comes into action automatically the moment a creative work is created. It is intended to promote authorship. Patents are meant to encourage ideas and have to be applied for. Trademarks protect nothing - they simply let the buyer know what he or she is buying. You could, I suppose, apply a trademark to the name 'Don Bosco', certainly to a Salesian Logo. You certainly can't copyright him. Enter copyleft, or maybe not? Maybe not. Copyleft is a term that came in with the so-called GNU Project for free software. If you really want something to be free, you put it in the Public Domain, of course, uncopyrighted.. But that would allow people to take the idea and turn it into proprietary software! So 'copyleft' was created - which insists that anyone who takes the idea, modifies it, builds something with it, must also pass along the freedom to further modify it. That stops it from becoming 'proprietary'. But my interest for the moment is not software, rather the creation of scholarly or other Salesian material, often in book form but also in other forms - web-based for example. Can we head in the direction of copyleft rather than copyright; are there ways of doing this, and why should we?

Creative Commons. One of the problems we English-speaking Salesians have is the paucity of material in English on our Salesian heritage. We are being urged to study Don Bosco, know him. The last thing we want to do is to be doing too much 'copyrighting' in things related to this task. But you take some of the major works that are (or were) in print. I won't reel off the names here since you know them. They are copyrighted and the real catch is the 'all rights reserved'. Why, I wonder? Because it has been standard publishing practice. But it does not have to be. Please read up about Creative Commons Licences. They are out to protect authorship but not restrict its fruits. And while I cannot in these few lines include statistics of studies done, they have been done and suggest less restrictive licences, which allow authors to re-use their material in other ways, others to freely copy their works, still more others to put it on the web - these actions actually result in more sales, not less! Google up 'The Long Tail' in reference to an article in Wired Magazine in 2004 for some very interesting background to this. It would suggest to me that a Lenti or a Bosco (the Teresio one!), the one scholarly, the other popular, would both be better served, and so would we, with a 'some rights reserved' Creative Commons Licence. (:nl:)