Legality of translation

"The law binds those who suffer from it no less than those to whom it is favorable." - F. Gentz

Translation difficulties

Translations of articles, news, book chapters are regularly published on habrahabr; sometimes there are announcements of completed translations of useful books under open licenses. Whether you are a translator or a reader, most of you will agree - it is very difficult to achieve the ideal of translation - this is an inevitable fact. It is not surprising that Goethe once said: “Translators are the same matchmakers: they sing the beauty of a woman, glorify her dignity and cause an irresistible passion for the original.” In turn, if we take into account the attitude of IT specialists to translated books on a computer topic, you can hear such a phrase (or maybe you yourself said it to someone) that the first language learned by the programmer should be English. But in fact, not everything is as bad as it might seem,

In light of the various events that make the Copyright hub (formerly called Dura Lex) swell more and more, translators, in addition to the philosophy of translation, must also take into account the more pragmatic aspect of translation - copyright.

Where is your passion?

A small digression. A few months ago, I translated the chapters of Passion for Programming by Chad Fowler. This is a very significant book for me, and I am very grateful to its author and sincerely want any Russian reader to have the opportunity to read it from cover to cover. Yes, you can easily buy it, but not everyone speaks such a level of English to read in the original language and, most importantly, to correctly understand what is written. After a brief correspondence with Chad, he indirectly agreedfor translation, but only those chapters of the book that are laid out on his blog. Several translations were made, then other translators pulled themselves together. In order to somehow speed up the process of the appearance of the full version of the book in Russian, I sent a request to one large publishing house regarding the translation of the book. They have more resources and they will definitely be able to find translators who will make a decent translation, but they have not answered me. It is possible that in a few years a translation of this book in Russian will appear. But people do not wait, and from time to time new translated chapters continue to appear on the hub.

Another translation recently appeared. Its author contacted me with a proposal to organize the translation of the book in full. Of course, he had a question about the legality of this event, since from his words some of the translators of past chapters began to remove translations into drafts, since this is a violation of copyright. When I started to write an answer to him, I decided to understand this issue in more detail, it became clear that the topic is quite scrupulous and deserves a collective discussion, since we publish translations here, read and add them to favorites, I would not want to moment one of them disappeared due to problems with the rule of law.

Guaranteed Rights

I must say right away that I do not have an appropriate legal education and I will make my conclusions on the basis of publicly available information and the small amount of information about jurisprudence that was given to us at the university. If you find an inaccuracy in the interpretation, please report it so that I can make the necessary corrections.

In the law of the Russian Federation "On Copyright" , in article 1274 "Free use of a work for informational, scientific, educational or cultural purposes" there is a second paragraph that gives green light to gratuitous translations of books.

It is allowed without the consent of the author or other copyright holder and without paying remuneration, but with the obligatory indication of the name of the author whose work is used, and the source of borrowing:
[...]
2) use of legally published works and excerpts from them as illustrations in publications, in radio - and television broadcasts, sound and video recordings of an educational nature to the extent justified by the intended purpose;

My interpretation of this paragraph is that it is possible to provide any translated works to the Russian reader free of charge for educational purposes. That is, we can easily translate any foreign texts into Russian in any volumes and publish them on the Internet. To ensure that the translation will always be free to access, it must be published under a non-commercial license, for example, Creative Commons BY-NC-SA, additionally indicating the author of the original and source.

In particular, under the terms of an agreement with a user, a habrahabr receives only a non-exclusive license to use published materials, so we can do anything with our translation here, including distributing it under the CC BY-NC-SA license. For greater purity of thoughts, when publishing a translation, it must be clearly indicated that the material is distributed only for educational purposes.

Dilemma

Due to the fact that I am not a specialist in the field of jurisprudence, I still have one open question. I hope someone stronger in legal matters will tell. In all books in the same "Passionate Programmer" there is a similar text:

All rights are reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior consent of the publisher.

This contradicts what I described earlier - the possibility of free distribution of the translated work. Googling, I found that federal laws have a higher priority over various user agreements, but, unfortunately, I could not find the corresponding regulatory document. If you know the relevant normative act (or maybe a clause of the Constitution) that defines the priorities of the laws, inform in the comments or through messages.

Yes, in the piece from the law above there is the phrase “as illustrations ... to the extent justified by the goal”. In this regard, several questions also arise. Is the purpose of publishing the translation in full sufficient for providing access to information to people who are not native speakers of English? Can a work in full be an “illustration”?

PS I hope that you will understand me correctly. I respect the authors and regularly buy books for my Kindle on Amazon, sometimes I buy paper editions. All this initiative is only to clarify the translation process and provide access to information that is not known when it appears officially in Russian.

UPD: Oh, here the first minuses flew to the topic and to karma. :) In principle, it’s understandable and I even expected the topic to be adopted ambiguously, saddened by the fact that there are no comments on this matter ... But still I decide to leave the topic published, if only for the reason that the issue of the legality of published translations needs constructive discussion .

UPD 2: My thoughts from the article, as it turned out, are not viable enough. In the first comment by edogsyou can read where I went too far. But still I think that the dialogue was a success, and at least for myself I learned a lot. Thanks to everyone who takes part in the discussion.