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BH

On wikisource they have a hebrew tanach [bible] which seems to be in the public domain [the original hebrew text itself is but the question would only be if they made minor changes, and according to second hand sources I've heard that they have not, but assuming they have not:] would I be legally allowed to make some javascript code to download certain select verses [or entire chapters], just the hebrew text alone, and write my own translation for it? I couldn't tell from the terms if I need to provide the actual URL for each and every verse, or at all, since the hebrew itself [if unchanged by them] is in the public domain

Source in question

B''H Bi'ezras -- Boruch Hashem
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    The title (is it legal to translate) and your actual question (is it legal to scrap) are two different questions. Not a legal advice but 1) public domain materials generally can be used however you want them, 2) webscraping may or may not be encouraged of the given site. the later is generally not a legal issue, but a resource issue.. – Greg Feb 16 '22 at 16:13
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    BTW, the Hebrew text, sans vowels and modern punctuation, is certainly public domain, but a punctuated version might not be. – DrMoishe Pippik Feb 17 '22 at 01:18
  • @DrMoishePippik cool thanks, I'm only interested in non vowels. But if I then make a separate program to automatically add vowels to non voweled text, would that be a problem? – B''H Bi'ezras -- Boruch Hashem Aug 03 '22 at 03:49

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Works on Wikisource are under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 license. By Wikimedia policy, reuse is encouraged; since they're sitting on the same servers as Wikipedia, I doubt copying a single text would even be noticed, but https://dumps.wikimedia.org/ has complete dumps of the entire Wikisource if you'd prefer to download it like that.

Unfortunately, the CC-BY-SA 3.0 license does confuse things a bit. On some other Wikisources, you can look at the source scan and see that there's no difference from that, which means the CC-BY-SA could only apply to the markup, to the extent there were creative differences. That text is not sourced, so it's conceivable there could be copyrightable changes. If you're really concerned, take a source like https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=njp.32101050277365 (scans of a 1906 Hebrew text of the Bible) and compare when translating.

(Personally, I wouldn't be doing extensive translation from a Wikisource text that has no provenance; if I'm going to do the work, it's going to be from something with a clear origin)

prosfilaes
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Since the text is on he.wikisource, it should be published under a permissive licence - I cannot read Hebrew, but I see a link to CC-BY-SA 3.0.

This means that you are free to grab whatever part of the text you need with any procedure (so javascript is ok) and that you may translate it. The only catch is that CC-BY-SA is a "viral" license, and therefore your translation - which is a "derived work", must have the same license.

As @DrMoishe Pippik pointed out, the text is punctuated (this far I can notice :-) ): this means that even if the original text is in the public domain the one present on he.wikisource need not.

mau
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