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



On Tue, Nov 08, 2005 at 06:16:52PM +0100, Lionel Elie Mamane wrote:
> (
>  Please mail followups to:
>  338077@bugs.debian.org, debian-legal@lists.debian.org, lionel@mamane.lu, roberto@familiasanchez.net
> )
> 
> 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
> 

Well, the CrossWire page does not have any warnings about distribution.
They are pretty good about putting warnings on texts that may still be
copyrighted in certain parts of the world, which is usually only a
concern for newer texts.

Additionally, the KJV text I downloaded from CrossWire contains all the
Strong's Hebrew and Greek numbers cross referenced to the text itself
and the sword-text-kjv package I made also suggests the
sword-dict-strongs-hebrew and sword-dict-strongs-greek packages the I
created.

The CrossWire page [0] also caims that their text is a derivative work
(probably becase of the integration of the Strong's references) and they
place it into the public domain.

If there is still an issue, I suppose we could start a non-GB section :-)

-Roberto

[0] http://www.crosswire.org/sword/modules/ModInfo.jsp?modName=KJV
-- 
Roberto C. Sanchez
http://familiasanchez.net/~roberto

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