An interesting post on Twitter by Gregory Crane of the Perseus project leads to some interesting finds:
The Scaife viewer build on work by @PonteIneptique. It would be easy to import the texts into gitlab.inria.fr/almanach/cllg/ from @ThesLingGraecae. We have chosen not to do so but there is no copyright at play. Here are the biggest 20 not yet in Perseus….
Thibault Clérice seems to be the main man here. Inria seems to be doing some very useful things. The Corpus Liberatum Linguae Graecae site at gitlab:
The CLLG Freed Corpus is a free XML-TEI corpus of Ancient Greek texts derived from the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG) E CD-ROM.
It has been transformed using Diogenes and enriched with Dapytains-compatible citation structures.The corpus is developed within the CLLG project, funded by the Programme Inria Quadrant at Inria.
The corpus is tested with HookTest.
With the interesting postscript:
Texts are distributed under French law, which holds that the texts of critical editions are not subject to copyright protection, as they do not constitute an expression of the editor’s personality (CA Paris, Pôle 5, 2ème Ch., 9 June 2017, no. 16/00005).
The Cour d’appel de Paris judgement is here, but I have not tried to read it. It seems to be a case where a publisher, Libraire Droz, sued another publisher, Libraire Classiques Garnier. Droz lost. AI Overview:
In CA Paris, Pôle 5, 2ème Ch., 9 June 2017, no. 16/00005, the Paris Court of Appeal confirmed that a publisher cannot claim copyright protection over public-domain medieval texts when the transcription involves no original creative input.
Lack of Originality: The court held that Librairie Droz did not perform a creative or transformative editorial adaptation on the underlying medieval texts. Transcribing, retranscribing, or applying standard paleographic methods (like fixing punctuation or abbreviations) to public domain material does not imprint the work with the author’s personality.
Copyright Infringement Rejected: Because the texts lacked the originality required to qualify as works of the mind (œuvres de l’esprit), the infringement (contrefaçon) and damages claims by Librairie Droz were dismissed.
Even more interesting is CoMMA:
…a large-scale corpus of medieval manuscripts produced through automatic text recognition. The corpus contains around 2.5b tokens drawn from more than 23,000 digitized manuscripts in Latin and Old French, harvested via IIIF. Unlike other resources, it is made of raw, non-normalized text enriched with layout analysis in various formats.
A PDF describing this is here. It does say:
For medieval manuscripts in Western languages, recognition accuracy is increasingly limited, not by models but by the availability of ground-truth data, with current error rates often below 10%.
10% is a big error rate, tho. Even 1% is painful in OCR. But it’s a massive step forward.
I see other projects which are bootlegging the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae. The TLG is run by the excellent Maria Pantelia, who relies on subscriptions to hire people to transcribe texts. So I have very mixed feelings here. The TLG is wonderful and necessary. It needs that revenue stream until the project is complete.
Much as I want to see everything available to everyone freely, I agree with Gregory Crane. I’m not going to do things that might injure the TLG. Nobody else should do so either. Let Dr Pantelia carry out her mission. The world will not end if we have to manage for a few more years until she’s done.
In general, if there are people out there producing stuff that promotes the classics, patristics, the ancient world, let them enjoy the income from their labour. Heaven knows there isn’t huge money to be made. A few PDFs for use by the poor people, of books that are sold at hundreds of dollars; that is one thing. That won’t affect the publisher revenue stream. But let’s not wreck projects like the TLG.
Update (26 Sep 2026): I learn from a twitter post by Gregory Crane that “the EU allows nations to copyright editions for up to but not more than 30 years.”
The regulation in question is article 5 of the EU Copyright Term Directive (Directive 2006/116/EC, originally 1993/98/EC) (Download PDF here). The regulation is optional, however. Relevant extract:
An AI search (caution!) tells me that only Germany – inevitably – and Estonia have implemented it. No doubt the German government – which seems to be completely subservient to the publishing industry – drew up this foolish clause.
In Remote Sensing, the standard for accuracy is 15% error rate, as set Anderson et al in 1976. It’s not that they wanted to put out bad maps or bad data in general, it’s that this was what was achievable. There is a very interesting article in the current issue of The Space Review about digitizing Konstantin Tsiolkovsky’s papers at the Russian Academy of science.
Does that mean that the texts in Sources Chrétiennes can be used in a public domain fashion?
Your guess is as good as mine!
Just a few weeks ago I was asking my co-students in Greek whether the first volumes of the Gottingen Septuagint were no longer under copyright. The first volumes should be in public domain now (unless the fact that the series is in progress keeps the copyright from expiring, but that’s unlikely), but they are still priced as if they were worth their weight in gold. Maybe they are, but the price is unreasonable so long after publication. When did the copyright expire on the first volumes, and, above all, why doesn’t someone make digital scans available of them?
I don’t know without looking – death plus 70 years possibly – but pirate PDFs certainly exist.
Based upon the French case cited, as well as Corel v. Bridgeman, I introduced in 2025 the following policy for the Guide to Evagrius Ponticus (https://evagriusponticus.net/about.htm):
“The Guide to Evagrius Ponticus includes, under Writings, many versions of Evagrius’s writings, and only those versions without license restrictions. This includes a number of texts in Greek, Syriac, and other ancient languages, drawn from the main text of modern critical editions. In United States, as elsewhere, courts have followed the general principle that any faithful reproduction of a public domain work is itself in the public domain (United States: Bridgeman v. Corel; France: Droz v. Garnier [commentary: Rouquette, Pearse]). The main text of a critical edition is not ‘recast, transformed, or or adapted’ (U.S.C. 17.101) and so is not a derivative or creative work; it remains the intellectual property (IP) of the original creator (in this case, Evagrius or an ancient translator), and IP rights are not transposed to the modern editor or publisher.”
The basic principle that underlies these cases is this: any faithful rendering of a work in the public domain is itself in the public domain. I would welcome further court cases, especially in the United States, to drive this point home.
In the meantime, I expect the TLG has the same sense of IP rights as I do, because they draw freely from recently published editions. When I was Editor in Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks (2007-2019), I never recall any requests from TLG to include our texts in their database. Nor would I expect them to have done so. Because the proper IP owners have been dead for centuries.
In my opinion, OCR projects are not a threat to the TLG, which provides an exceptional service that has, at the present, no rival, reflective of the immense amount of labor invested by UC Irvine. I happily pay my annual TLG subscription, and I support the open source projects (in fact, I run one!). It’s not either/or. It’s both/and.
There is nothing astonishing about this.
The rule is universally that you cannot copyright something that you did not author.
Copyright in France is called Droit De L’auteur”
So if you didn’t write it, you can’t claim copyright over it. And that is no different anywhere in Europe or the US.
You simply cannot take somebody else’s text. Strip out the introduction. Strip out the praefatio. Strip out the discussion, Strip out the footnotes strip out the end notes. Strip out the appendices. Strip out the indexes, and claim copyright on it.
Well you can claim copyright on it but no court in the western world acknowledge it because you have contributed nothing to its creation and have in fact excised huge chunks of the work you are claiming to represent written by somebody else that you are claiming copyright over.
This is a very sticky mythology that has no foundation in common sense nor law.
This is all true, but German publishers think differently and have successfully established copyright over modern editions of medieval texts in the courts of that land.
The German thing expires after 25 years The statutory test is that the edition must be the result of wissenschaftlich sichtender Tätigkeit scholarly critical/editorial activity and must differ substantially from previously known editions. The right belongs specifically to the Verfasser der Ausgabe, the person who made that edition, and expires after 25 years.
The absurdity of the TLG (Perseus and F1K also and this new French repository and uncle Tom Cobbley and all) claiming copyright over someone else’s critical edition which they have stripped naked of almost all of its critical apparatus, the original of which is already out of copyright, is worthy of Monty Python.
Nobody gets to slap a copyright notice on the edition published by Hans Von Arnim other than Hans Von Arnim who he has not been with us for a very long time.. shuffled off this mortal coil, fallen off his perch…
Even less so if they have stripped back the critical apparatus down to the raw public domain Greek peppered with a few Leiden marks and inline comments in Latin
It is comedy gold.
Here is my copyrighted version of Barnaby Rudge wot Charles Dickens wrote (I took a load of stuff out) Oh and Aristotle’s metaphysics and Macbeth .
The icing on the cake is that the CLLG, while (claiming that these works are not copyrightable under French law, has slapped copyright on their reworkings of the output of Peter Heslins exporter of the TLG copies of other people’s workings 2,000-Year-Old texts..
Absurd is the only word for it, And for some reason the TLG, Perseus, F1K and the CLLG are taking themselves seriously. And what is worse people believe them.
It’s the Emperor’s new clothes…
Their bluff is called ..
I think that there is a link to this project at Université Paris-Saclay : https://thegreeklibrary.pages.lisn.upsaclay.fr/
what do you think of this ? i found this useful but idk if the OCR is serious