KJV Bible - Crown Copyright in UK [was: Bug#338077: ITP: sword-text-kvj -- King James Version with Strongs Numbers and Morphology]

[Lionel Elie Mamane <lionel@mamane.lu>]

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On Tue, Nov 08, 2005 at 10:13:42AM -0500, Roberto C. Sanchez wrote:
> Quoting Lionel Elie Mamane <lionel@mamane.lu>:
>> On Mon, Nov 07, 2005 at 08:51:26PM -0500, Roberto C. Sanchez wrote:

>>>* License         : Public Domain
>>>  Description     : King James Version with Strongs Numbers and Morphology

>>>This is the King James Version of the Holy Bible (also known as the
>>>Authorized Version) with embedded Strong's Numbers. The rights to
>>>the base text are held by the Crown of England.

>> What "rights" are you speaking about? The text certainly is far too
>> old for any copyright to hold and you yourself tag it as "public
>> domain". So what "right" is being spoken of here?

> Based on my understanding [0], the Crown of England maintains the
> perogative to authorize printings of the KJV text in Great Britain.
> It is in the public domain everywhere else.

Ain't law fun? <grin>

This makes the KJV of the bible non-free in GB and probably even
illegal to distribute at all in GB, unless the Crown gives a blanket
license for electronic distribution. Does it?

According to the wikipedia article, we can escape this Crown Copyright
if what the package will contain is an "annotated Study Bible". The
question is whether that thing will be annotated enough to be
considered as such.

Please investigate this before uploading to Debian.

> [0]
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_James_Version_of_the_Bible#Copyright_status

-- 
Lionel