If I get permission from the rights holder of a book, is it ok if it’s not public domain, to use it for sentences?
If you get permission to release sentences from the work under CC0 (ie., effectively release those into the public domain) then my guess would be that it’s fine.
I think a pertinent question is what exactly you got permission for and whether they know what that entails. E.g., if you asked for, and got, permission to add sentences from their book(s) to the CV corpus but didn’t specify that that means that the sentences will be published under CC0(/in the public domain), I don’t think that’s a permission granted with “informed consent”.
I am just a layman who’s spent way too much dabbling in this subject though, not a lawyer—and neither am I a representative of the CV project who’s able to speak on the project’s behalf. 
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I think the process described here is the only way:
The legal document there is a bit cryptic, but it would result in releasing the work in CC0, before it can be used.
When this came out, I was expecting a “CV-ONLY USE PERMIT”, but this is not the case, as you cannot put any restriction on CC licenses.
One “trick” I could think of was:
- You get their permission yourself
- You pre-process the data to get suitable sentences (word/length limits, alphabet, and problematic words like names removed). You shuffle them and give the list back.
- They publish the list on their website in a webpage and put the CC0 license to that list, and you link to it.
- If they are the owner of the license (i.e. all related/attached copyrights, writers, translators, editors, …) they have the right to change the license for those sentences.
not a lawyer—and neither am I a representative of the CV project
Same here, and I’d like to hear from the team/Mozilla Legal about this. It is not easy for companies to make their licensed material public otherwise, they usually live from it.
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Thank you both.
I guess, I will just contact the copyright holder and see how it goes.
One detail. I don’t intend to use the whole book. Just some sentences, here and there, which I find interesting.
When I think a word is interesting (e.g. missing vocabulary, less used phoneme) I write it down. From time to time, I create several (conversational) sentences from each of them. So do several members of our community.
We use shared Excel on Cloud, so we can also review/change others’ work.
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