Amharic Bible

Tes

Today I called the owner of the file, the Biblica,the one with whom I have spoken gave me the following answer"
Dear .........

 

Thank you for your telephone call today about the New Amharic Standard Version in electronic products;  to confirm our discussion points, Biblica is not currently a producer or developer of electronic products; however, we do consider license requests for  our Bible texts from electronic product publisher’s. Thank you again."

 So, according to his speech, there  could be possibility of allowing to be published,but till now , there is no convincing response from Logos,I hope Logos would reconsider my apeal onnce again.http://www.biblica.com/uploads/pdf-files/bibles/amharic/nt/romans.pdf

Becides not only Amharic Bible ,like Swahili,and others as well.

 Dear brothers and friends in the Logos forums,I forward it, so that you give your suggestions as well.

 

Rosie Perera

Dear Tes,

I recall from email discussions back and forth with you and Yared that Biblica will not license the Amharic text for commercial sale. It was unclear whether that means they will not license it at all to electronic publishers like Logos who make money from commercial products (even if they give this particular resource away for free) or whether if Logos is willing to give it away for free (like they do with the Finnish Bible) they would be able to get the rights to publish it. I kind of took the pessimistic view when I saw the latest response, and I have not had the time to pursue it further since then.

Here's the relevant email:

Subject: Re: Amharic Bible 1962
Date: Wednesday, August 18, 2010, 3:42 AM

Hi Yared,

thanks for contacting me, we are all well. I hope you are well too!

Since I am the copyright holder only of the Unicode version of the Amharic bible, commercial usage needs the consent of the Ethiopian Bible Society as well as mine.

My personal belief is, that bible software for old existing bible translations (in contrast to printed bibles or newly made translations) should always be free to use for everyone. Therefore I unfortunately can not  give permission to anybody to use it for commercial purposes. There are thousands of freeware applications on the market, I personally do not see the need for commercial bible software anymore.

Of course I can not speak for the printed version, because as already being said, the Ethiopian Bible Society is in charge.

I hope you understand and respect my point of view.

By the way, the data on bible.org needs also my permission for commercial work ...

May God bless you
Dirk

Dirk Roeckmann

And here is an email I got from Phil Gons at Logos when I inquired about possibly pursuing this (this was before I saw the above email from Dirk, which discouraged me from following up at all with Bill Nienhuis, whom I have not heard back from on this at all):

Thanks for your efforts with this. Tes will indeed be thrilled if this materializes.

 

Anything relating to contracts and licensing of copyrighted works goes through our Publisher Relations department, of which Bill Nienhuis is the head. I’m copying him on this email.

 

Bill will probably need to chat with Dirk Röckmann and find out if we’d be able to charge for our edition or distribute it for free. If we’ll be able to charge something for the resource, the next step is to put it on Pre-Pub so we can gage the interest level. If we’ll be required to give it away for free, we’ll probably want to assess the cost of production first and make a decision on whether it warrants the expense.

 

Another option would be to identify a public domain Amharic Bible and put it up on Community Pricing, which Marketing could handle.

 

I’ll let Bill follow up with what he thinks is the best way to proceed.

Phil