Free Library of Christian Scholarship

The Dead Sea Scrolls are going online:

Over the next two years, the Israel Antiquities Authority will digitally photograph and scan every bit of crumbling parchment and papyrus that makes up the scrolls, which include the oldest written record of the Bible’s Old Testament.

The images eventually will be posted on the Internet for anyone to see.

In the search for an appropriate rubric to govern the sort of licenses which will be permissible for content hosted by FLCS I have discovered the Free Cultural Works definition which I believe suits our purpose nicely:

• Availability of source data: Where a final work has been obtained through the compilation or processing of a source file or multiple source files, all underlying source data should be available alongside the work itself under the same conditions. This can be the score of a musical composition, the models used in a 3D scene, the data of a scientific publication, the source code of a computer application, or any other such information.
• Use of a free format: For digital files, the format in which the work is made available should not be protected by patents, unless a world-wide, unlimited and irrevocable royalty-free grant is given to make use of the patented technology. While non-free formats may sometimes be used for practical reasons, a free format copy must be available for the work to be considered free.
• No technical restrictions: The work must be available in a form where no technical measures are used to limit the freedoms enumerated above.
• No other restrictions or limitations: The work itself must not be covered by legal restrictions (patents, contracts, etc.) or limitations (such as privacy rights) which would impede the freedoms enumerated above. A work may make use of existing legal exemptions to copyright (in order to cite copyrighted works), though only the portions of it which are unambiguously free constitute a free work.

Inhabitatio Dei is hosting the 2008 Bonhoeffer Blog Conference. Halden Doerge, the site's proprietor, has called for responses to the various essays which will be published there as a part of the conference.