Whitefield
Puritan Board Junior
I am constantly trolling the internet for public domain theological works. If I find a work that interests me, I mark it up into a web page for my web site. Every once in a while I get a chuckle because I run across a web site which has a disclaimer which says something like this: “All the material on this web site is copyrighted by me.” What causes me to chuckle is the knowledge that not all the material on a web site can be copyrighted if it contains material by someone who has been dead for 150 years. How the text is presented on a web page might be copyrightable by the page creator (artistic property), and any substantive translations might be copyrightable (intellectual property). But the actual text from someone like William Cunningham cannot be copyrighted by anyone. So, the disclaimer: “All the material . . . etc.” is humorous at best and ignorant at worst; either way I find it funny.
