New Resource: Disclaimer for 3-line, Pīnyīn Plus, etc. Material
Recently, 3lines.org stopped offering 3-line material for download or viewing, citing this recent Watchtower article. After finding out about this drastic change on the part of the 3lines.org team, I decided to dive more deeply than I had before into researching the legal and spiritual factors relating to 3-line, Pīnyīn Plus, and similar material. Eventually, I came to some perhaps surprising conclusions that are different from what the 3lines.org team concluded. These conclusions are expressed in a new article posted on tiandi.info:
- Disclaimer for 3-line, Pīnyīn Plus, etc. Material
- Short Links:
Links ▶ Articles (tiandi.info/articles)
For easy reference, here is the text of this new disclaimer:
While the organization expresses valid general concerns here about posting official publications to the Internet, there are good reasons for concluding that those concerns do not apply to 3-line, Pīnyīn Plus, and similar material:
- Simply copying from the original official publication so as to supersede or take the place of it infringes on copyright. 3-line, Pīnyīn Plus, and similar material does not do this. On the contrary, 3-line, Pīnyīn Plus, and similar material uses material from the original official publication in a highly transformative way and repurposes it for a different nonprofit educational purpose, so there is good reason to consider this to be fair use. That would mean that such material does not infringe on copyright. (E.g., there are legal precedents (Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corp., Perfect 10, Inc. v. Amazon.com, Inc.) for considering the use of thumbnails to be fair use, and thus not infringing on copyright.) Also, producers of such material have avoided including trademarks in it. In view of the above, the existence of 3-line, Pīnyīn Plus, and similar material should provide no basis for claiming that the organization has abandoned its copyright or trademark rights. So, such material should present no hindrance to the organization’s efforts to deter opposers and commercial enterprises from misusing its copyrighted material.
- Only official material from “the faithful and discreet slave”’s official sources should be viewed or used as spiritual food. (And ideally, this spiritual food should be in one’s own mother tongue.) 3-line, Pīnyīn Plus, and similar unofficial material should not be viewed or used as spiritual food, which is for learning spiritual things from. 3-line, Pīnyīn Plus, and similar unofficial material is only meant to help Chinese field publishers with language learning, so that they can more quickly become more effective at using the original official publication’s contents to praise Jehovah and help others without being unnecessarily obstructed and delayed by the complex and difficult-to-learn-and-remember Chinese characters.
- Along with the misuse of official publications by opposers and commercial enterprises, the serious yet unnecessary tradition-based difficulties presented by Chinese characters must also be fought against, since they act as a Great Wall seriously obstructing our God-honouring and life-saving preaching and teaching work in what is probably the biggest worldwide language field that has ever existed anywhere.
- Rather than detracting from or competing with the original official publication’s value as spiritual food, the experiences of many have shown that 3-line, Pīnyīn Plus, and similar material can be extraordinarily effective at helping Chinese field publishers to break through the Great Wall of Chinese characters, so that these products of mere human tradition do not get in the way of them fully using the original official publication’s spiritual food for its intended purposes of honouring Jehovah and helping others spiritually.
I am also working to include a version of this new disclaimer with each relevant Chinese field resource I make available, including all the currently available publication-based Pīnyīn Plus resources, which are listed here:
