Handling licences for generated files

[Ingo Klöcker]

On Samstag, 9. September 2023 14:58:39 CEST Johnny Jazeix wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> for the new project to translate subtitles for KDE videos, we generate
> subtitles files (srt files) from po files.
> 
> To generate the translated file, we use the original srt file (which
> is under the licence/copyright of the creator choose) and the po files
> written by the translators (some po files have licence and/or
> copyright, other none of it).
> 
> For the generated file, is there a constraint of licence/copyright due
> to how we create them (and from which data)?
> 
> Or could I simply consider all the generated files as CC-BY-SA-4.0
> with a generic copyright ("2023 This_file_is_part_of_KDE" for
> example)?

I'd say this depends on the license of the original. The translated files could 
be considered derivative works of the original files. Which means they inherit 
the license of the original files. And the copyright. Additionally, they get 
the copyright of the translators. Just look at how copyright works for 
translated literature.

If the original subtitles were automatically transcribed by some (AI) tool, 
then they are most likely not copyrightable. Not even if a human being did 
some error correction.

I'm not a lawyer. So, that's just my layman understanding of copyright.

Regards,
Ingo
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