---
name: legal-source-verification
description: Research and verify authoritative, legally downloadable editions, translations, archives, and primary-source documents.
version: 1.0.0
metadata:
  hermes:
    tags: [research, copyright, public-domain, archives, pdf, editions]
---

# Legal Source Verification

Use when a user asks for authoritative or legal PDFs/downloads of books, translations, historical documents, religious texts, editions, or archival material. The task is not complete until the exact file, edition identity, provenance, scope, and rights status have all been checked.

## Core workflow

1. Define the requested work and recension/version; distinguish the ancient or underlying work from each modern edition, translation, introduction, notes, and typesetting.
2. Search institutional sources first: national and university libraries, academies, publisher open-access platforms, established digitization projects, and official archives.
3. Inspect the actual downloadable file. Confirm its title page, translator/editor, publisher, date, language, completeness, and whether it contains the full text, fragments, excerpts, commentary, or only a table of contents.
4. Capture both the stable catalog/landing page and the exact direct download URL. Test that the download URL returns the claimed file rather than HTML, a login/challenge page, preview, or metadata record.
5. Determine copyright separately for the source text, translation, scholarly apparatus, and scan. Apply the law of the jurisdiction the user cares about and state the calculation rather than merely saying “public domain.”
6. Cross-check creator death dates and joint-authorship rules. Never infer legal status solely from an Internet Archive, Google Books, Scribd, or repository download button.
7. Prefer an older verified public-domain translation over a newer scan whose translator remains protected. Treat unattributed uploads and mirrors as leads, not authoritative legal sources.
8. Report negative results narrowly: “no qualifying institutional/legal full-language PDF found after checking …,” followed by protected standard editions or non-qualifying sources and the reason each was excluded.

## Verification standards

- A faithful scan of a public-domain print edition usually does not create a new work copyright, but note repository terms or database/image rights where relevant.
- For Germany/EU, translations are independently protected and normally run for the translator’s life plus 70 years through the end of that calendar year; check the last-surviving relevant contributor for joint works.
- “Ancient text” does not mean “modern translation is public domain.”
- “Free to download” does not mean “free to redistribute or legally reusable in the user’s jurisdiction.”
- If a recension or manuscript was only discovered in the twentieth century, a nineteenth-century translation of that specific recension cannot exist; search for licensed open access rather than assuming public domain.

## Output format

For every requested work provide:

- work and recension/manuscript identifier;
- exact edition title;
- translator and editor roles;
- publisher/host and publication date;
- stable source page URL;
- exact direct PDF/download URL;
- full text vs fragments/excerpts/commentary;
- copyright or licence status, jurisdiction, calculation, and caveats;
- confidence/exclusion reason when no qualifying source is found.

For historical-text and repository-specific discovery techniques, read `references/historical-text-downloads.md`.

## Pitfalls

- Do not present a bibliographic record as a download.
- Do not call a scan complete until contents or page ranges are checked.
- Do not conflate a German index page with a German translation; inspect the text itself.
- Do not use “no source exists” when the research only established that no qualifying source was found.
- Do not recommend user-upload platforms when translator, licence, or provenance cannot be established.