John Scalzi just rewrote Little Fuzzy, which is out of copyright but much more recent, and got permission from the holders of the copyright of the other Fuzzy books to publish it. He calls it a "reboot".
There's a wide ethical space out there.
Copyright exists to encourage people to create -- I think that's the legality and the ethics of it. I wouldn't see anything unethical about you taking an OOC text with a dead author and translating it or rebooting it, and I wouldn't see anything unethical about your making money from it either -- your time is worth something, translators get paid. And the original would still be there.
I may be influenced by my desire for somebody to translate Burns. I had a German friend who kept saying how wonderful Burns was in Rilke's German translation. "This is supposed to be kind of English" shouldn't be enough to prevent translation into comprehensibility.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2011-05-13 11:22 am (UTC)There's a wide ethical space out there.
Copyright exists to encourage people to create -- I think that's the legality and the ethics of it. I wouldn't see anything unethical about you taking an OOC text with a dead author and translating it or rebooting it, and I wouldn't see anything unethical about your making money from it either -- your time is worth something, translators get paid. And the original would still be there.
I may be influenced by my desire for somebody to translate Burns. I had a German friend who kept saying how wonderful Burns was in Rilke's German translation. "This is supposed to be kind of English" shouldn't be enough to prevent translation into comprehensibility.