FAQ: What is the copyright status of your text?

Evidently, any copyright on the text itself has long since lapsed, and so only 
the various introductions and other editorial material found in Colunga and 
Turrado would ever have been under copyright. I have not included any such 
material, though my understanding is that the copyright on this has in any case 
expired.

I thought long and hard about asserting copyright to this edition and releasing 
it under a 'free document' or 'open text' licence: I am no legal expert, and I 
don't want to find that someone takes the text and restricts its public 
availability using some legal sleight of hand. (There is also a danger that 
people will innocently change or deliberately pervert the text, leading to a 
confused set of similar versions, but I hardly think a formal copyright notice 
will affect that—see below for the steps I'm taking to ensure that the 
integrity of the text can be guaranteed.) In the end, this seemed so patently 
absurd, if not blasphemous, that I've settled on the only sensible course, 
which is to release the text into the public domain, trusting to the conscience 
of those who use it to acknowledge their source and make clear any 
modifications they make.

[source: http://vulsearch.sourceforge.net/text.html on 2005-11-07]