Free The Word...!

Brandon Vogt recently got into hot water when, after making the texts of the Holy Father's encyclical available in electronic format, he was taken to task by the USCCB and the Holy See.

Brandon isn't arguing about the right of the Holy See to keep the copyright on Church documents, but what he wants is to petition for the documents to be made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs license. This means that people would be able to copy, distribute, display, and perform only verbatim copies of the work. It's an extremely popular way of safely distributing texts, especially digital content. Proper credit has to be given for the source, and the copyright is retained by the Holy See.

If you want to read more about how Brandon inadvertently fell foul of the copyright laws, and the reasons behind his proposals, check out his excellent post. You can also sign the petition by leaving a comment in his com-box.