Legalities of creating a JavaME Equivalent to YanceyWare

This seems like a good place to raise the question of the relationship or nature of agreement between Bryce Yancey and the Church which allowed for the distribution of content via YanceyWare? I am asking because I have been looking into the possibility of creating a JavaME equivalent to this application. I have already been able to create Java code which can read out the html content of a ybk file. This was a proof of concept. I have not had any success in getting in contact with Bryce and so I ended up reverse engineering the ybk file format. This allowed to have a proof of concept that a compatible Java reader could be created. I am concerned at this point about the legalities of doing so.

I understand that the Church is under responsibility to preserve the copyright on the scriptures. This means that in a worsted case scenario If I proceed wrongly I could break copyright and end up getting sued by the Church. As such it seems prudent before going any further to find out exactly what the legalities are in order to create such a reader.

Why create a JavaME reader if YanceyWare already exists? The reason is that there are far far more Java enabled phones around than Windows Mobile based devices. This would mean a JavaME based reader could have the broadest reach for mobile devices as JavaME seems to be the widest spread common platform for mobile phones and smart phones.

Carl,

I've been following your posts in the YanCEyWare forum regarding this and I think your questions would be best answered by either Bryce himself, or contact the Church's Intellectual Property Office directly at:

Phone: 801-240-3959 or 1-800-453-3860, ext. 2-3959
Fax: 801-240-1187
E-Mail: cor-intellectualproperty@ldschurch.org.

or by writing to:

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
Intellectual Property Office
50 E. North Temple
18th Floor, Salt Lake City, UT 84150-3012

I have sent an email. I shall wait and see regarding the response.

Emails sent to both the Intellectual Property departments and Bryce Yancey. Now I just have to wait and see.

Carl Jokl wrote:Emails sent to both the Intellectual Property departments and Bryce Yancey. Now I just have to wait and see.

Lets hope both can see the advantages in what we are trying to achieve here.

The Ybk format with its support is ideal to make available to others while preserving the content.

It is not going to be an easy project even if approved. JavaME programming is challenging. Memory and resources are constrained. Available API's are limited. If I get a reader working it would likely work quite differently to YanceyWare. I am not trying to have a full blown HTML rendering capability, at least not initially anyway. I will probably be doing a lot of low level stuff. It could be gruelling but I am a glutton for punishment so I guess I wouldn't have it any other way.

From my perspective I would happily have all of the project be open source. I am not doing this for the money or profit and I never was much of an entrepreneur. I might end up not being able to make all of the project open source if the nature of working with proprietary technologies or protected resources part of any agreement might prevent me from distributing the source for handling the file format for example.

Another hurdle I could run into is with JSR 75 (file system access). In order to use that most phones require the Java app to be digitally signed. To do this I am likely going to need to pay for a certificate from an issuing body. I might just have to deal with it if/when it comes up. I don't know a huge deal about the practicalities of getting digital certificates for Java i.e. whether I have to get an approval certificate from each handset vendor or whether I just have to get one from someone like Verisign. I just hope it isn't something with huge prohibitive costs such that I cannot afford to do it. I can live with paying some money for the greater good. If it is God's will that it happens then I am sure he shall prepare a way for it to come to pass.

*Update*

I have now signed up to: http://javaverified.com

This seems a fairly good place to start looking into signing of MIDlets. The cost of testing and having applications signed is not made clear. To even start the process I need a publisher ID which I can get from Trust Center: http://www.trustcenter.de/en/products/t ... rified.htm. That would cost $200 to get a certificate and the certificate will expire after a year. I wonder if the Church's status as a registered charity makes any difference to anything if for arguments sake the Church took ownership of the project. It is one thing to charge large sums to businesses. At the end of the day those business make the money back though sales of their products. In the case of a non profit project it is just pure cost with no hope of getting the money back. Well, we shall see. In the mean time more waiting. Technically I may have broken the terms of use for the forum as one of the items not to post was "Legal Discussions" unless something else was meant by that.

I note that you are from Alnwick. Would you know Timothy Kay? For all I know you could actually be Timothy Kay. If I remember correctly he said he would soon be starting studying something relating to 3D rendering at Norwich University.

Bryce got in touch and seems willing to let me use the format under some provisos. Some details are still to be worked out. I have heard nothing from the intellectual property department. I wonder if they will get back to me or if they are too busy.

Carl Jokl wrote:I have heard nothing from the intellectual property department.

Looking at the time stamps, it appears that you've sent your request after hours on Friday. Monday the 7th was a national holiday (Labor Day) in the US. So I don't think they've even had a chance to read their mail.

Carl Jokl wrote:Bryce got in touch and seems willing to let me use the format under some provisos. Some details are still to be worked out. I have heard nothing from the intellectual property department. I wonder if they will get back to me or if they are too busy.

Thats great news Bryce.

dkjorgi

PS I have replied in a private message about Tim.

It looks like the agreement has been basically accepted. There might still be some details to clarify. I may not start developing this project in earnest until I finish my Sun Certified Java Developer assignment and it has been submitted for marking. The bulk of the work is done on this assignment but I have some finishing touches and documentation to do for it before it is ready to be submitted. I have wanted it to be finished long before now but the Church is very good at having lots of meetings, activities and assignments which squeeze whatever out of work time you have such that I am not getting as much time to work on my assignment as I would like (I am sure many of you know the feeling). I really want this assignment done and submitted so believe me I will get it finished as soon as I can.

Some potential interesting developments but nothing official yet.

Looking at technical problems again. My old Motorola V635 can store up to 4768K of data in persistent storage. This might be enough to store the standard works in. In ybk (yanceware format) the full scriptures with study helps comes to 9.45mb Without the study helps it is about 6.15mb. The YanceyWare text is stored in the form of HTML meaning quite a lot more verbose than just the text on it's own. However there is compression in use. If I also did not store any images and came up with a very compact binary format and also use compression for storing the data perhaps I could get the size down to fit in the 4768k constrains of the phone. It remains to be seen. At the worsed case it might mean older phones having to swap which scriptures they had stored in them to suit what the user was reading through at the time. The Book of Mormon will fit definitely. Perhaps there are higher efficiency compression algorithms too which could compress more. We shall see.

It looks like I was able to delete old photos and music and freed up more space on the phone and the Java control panel now says I have access to over 7000K. This is more promising. It also might mean that the amount of space available to Java is not kept at a total fixed constraint but could be proportional to the total space available on the phone. It seems to be at least for this phone.

I am probably going to need a new thread. This is no longer legalities albeit I haven't heard from the Church's intellectual property department but I should create a thread about technicalities. I just bought a cheap USB synch cable for my old V635 as I read it may let me delete the protected files on my phone to free up a bit more space.

Carl Jokl wrote:I am probably going to need a new thread. This is no longer legalities albeit I haven't heard from the Church's intellectual property department but I should create a thread about technicalities. I just bought a cheap USB synch cable for my old V635 as I read it may let me delete the protected files on my phone to free up a bit more space.

Carl,

I don't know how quick of a response you were expecting, but I'd suggest that you give this some time. Perhaps several days. The brethren do not always respond quickly to everyone's questions and often take the time to discuss things before responding.

Carl Jokl wrote:I am probably going to need a new thread. This is no longer legalities albeit I haven't heard from the Church's intellectual property department but I should create a thread about technicalities. I just bought a cheap USB synch cable for my old V635 as I read it may let me delete the protected files on my phone to free up a bit more space.

Carl, you have achieved a lot in a short space of time so now lean back, breathe , finish your Sun assignment and wait for the church to come back to you. Like my colleague Techgy said give it some time. If you dont hear from them in 1-2 week's then you have my suggestion of what to do next.

Well that is worth bearing in mind. have started doing some tests on the capacity of Record Store with read devices and the initial results have been disappointing. It looks like it may be much as I feared with the space available per MIDlet suite being very constrained. My old Motorola V635 is reporting a mere 15K of space available in the RecordStore. My new HTC Touch Pro has a more generous but still limited 2meg limit reported from JBlend. The Sun JavaFX preview SDK is most generous which is sure not to be typical and offers me 130mb of space.

I am sorry if I have been going a bit quickly. I am used to the culture of the business world in which I work where it seems the boss wants everything and wants it yesterday. Lots of pressure with little let up. Sometimes I can forget that other organisations are not like that.

Carl Jokl wrote:I am sorry if I have been going a bit quickly. I am used to the culture of the business world in which I work where it seems the boss wants everything and wants it yesterday. Lots of pressure with little let up. Sometimes I can forget that other organisations are not like that.

I think you will find most of us work in a similar environment as yourself and that goes for the church as well.

I don't think it's a case of "other organisations are not like that" but rather that most places are naturally fast to want things done for themselves and much slower at doing things for others.

It would seem from this post that YanceyWare does not have any permission from the church to use the scriptures. On the other hand the church do make other material available (such as The Ensign etc) in the ybk format via lds.org.

So for me I will have to wait patiently until the church comes out with further information about their plans for the Scripture API.

Having a reader that can read both the ybk format (for offline viewing) and access the church's web services would seen ideal in many aspects.

dkjorgi wrote:It would seem from this post that YanceyWare does not have any permission from the church to use the scriptures. On the other hand the church do make other material available (such as The Ensign etc) in the ybk format via lds.org.

So for me I will have to wait patiently until the church comes out with further information about their plans for the Scripture API.

Having a reader that can read both the ybk format (for offline viewing) and access the church's web services would seen ideal in many aspects.

Keep in mind that the only official electronic version of the scriptures in PDA format is the version that works in EZReader that is no longer supported. So, if you are going to have the scriptures on your PDA in any format other than that, you will not have an "official" version of the scriptures.

And I do not know what arrangements, if any, the other versions have regarding permissions for use. I think if I were to ask the question and follow it through, I would wind up taking the scriptures off of my PDA if I were not still using EZReader.

I could really use an app like that for my Nokia smartphone. I have used YanCEyWare as my scriptures ever since i got a pocket pc
but this last week it bit the dust, and i had to replace it. All the pocket pc's out there where just out of my price range, so i got a Nokia 5800. To my disappointment i found that the only reader was Mobipocket, which works but is not near as friendly when it comes to the links to other books.

I was wondering what is happening now on this project?