allofmp3.com was an online music store in Russia that sold western owned music for about a nickel a track. Russian law allowed something call compulsory licensing, which let government agencies approve the license to reproduce and sell entertainment and literature even against the wishes of the works’ creator.

allofmp3.com was found acquitted in Russian criminal court. And the RIAA dropped all charges against it (the owner) in U.S. Federal court.

The US Trade Rep. and the Russian gov worked out a deal to shut the business down as a condition of Russia’s WTO accession, but the owner opened up a new store the next day, mp3sparks.com, which sells the same songs just as cheep and has been operating “legally” since 2007.

Anyway, in a state with such laws, it would be legal to reproduce the books and sell them or distribute them as long as a portion of the profits were given to the author.

I think G’s work is so unique, creative and complex that it will be impossible to disguise any re-creation as anything other than a copyright infringement.

There is some level of modification and restatement that is sufficient to avoid violating copyright protection. As your excerpt states, it’s not clearly exactly where the line is. Maybe you couldn’t copy the exact structure and topical sequence of the SGA, but it would be easy enough to shuffle those around. Whatever level of rearrangement and rewriting is necessary, that’s what I suggest.

I think the bigger problem with my suggestion 2 is that it’s probably pretty much impossible for almost anyone to actually digest and restate the SGA. Let me quote a mathematically inclined friend of mine:

All I have to contribute on this subject is that I know from personal experience that when reading mathematics this sophisticated when your own intelligence is, well, ordinary, classifying something as either a typo or a stunningly brilliant insight is nigh on impossible.

I still have nightmares about the “textbook” in homological algebra that turned out to be (roughly) transcribed lecture notes. :shudder: I wasted weeks decyphering that crap, and it was just “regular” hard algebra.

I don’t see why. You simply avoid “extensive taking of entire structure and topical sequence”. That is what the art of textbook writing is all about.

I think it’s clear that your option #2 violates the copyright. I outline why in my previous post one post above yours.

1) Convince Grothendieck to change his mind.

2) Republish the content in a sufficiently modified form. Instead of transliterating the SGA directly, interested parties would have to understand, digest, and restate the work in their own words. It’s not obvious exactly how different a rewrite would have to be to avoid legal challenge, but it’s likely that the project could have a very similar structure to the SGA as long as the text itself was materially different. I haven’t read the SGA, so I don’t know how much important information is encoded in Grothendieck’s particular phrasing or diction, but that would be lost.

The situation does present an opportunity for anyone who is skilled at summarizing or explaining the SGA on their own, assuming they can find a copy.

It seems that we have gotten stricker about this than in the past. I was surprised to see, when reading Einstein’s 1905 paper for another topic, that Einstein made exactly zero references to other work, which was surely out there.