The proper holder of copyright in a work is the author of that work — Anselm as the author of the Proslogion would be its copyright holder. (Of course, all the works given here have long since become part of the public domain!) It is an established principle of copyright law that the maker of an edition of a text can only claim copyright in those features that are unique or particular to that edition; in practice, this means the editorial apparatus and notes, which have been systematically removed from the texts given here. Hence they are not encumbered by copyright.

But even if they were, these texts can be posted. On Wednesday, 31 March 2004, the Federal Court of Canada handed down a ruling on the fair use of copyrighted material on the Internet. As part of his 31-page ruling, Judge Konrad von Finckenstein declared: “The mere fact of placing a copy on a shared directory in a computer where that copy can be accessed… does not amount to distribution,” and hence not to copyright violation even if they were encumbered by copyright. The full text of the decision is available here.

Law is an unreliable guide to morality, however. These texts are provided here to allow scholars to perform research, and in particular to facilitate computer searches of their content. They are pure ASCII files. I have done some minimal efforts at standardization to make such searches possible (using classical orthography for instance). Please be sure to acknowledge the editors who have put long hours into preparing these texts. Of course, you will need to consult their editions anyway for their editorial apparatus. These texts are no substitute for the real thing. Use them with proper respect for their authors and their editors, who stand behind them.

LATIN TEXTS:

Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Apuleius, Porphyry, Augustine, Boethius, Cassiodorus, Calcidius, Eriugena, Anselm, Abelard, Gilbert, Grosseteste, Bonaventure, Aquinas, Scotus, Ockham, Buridan, Cajetan, Descartes.