Re: 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 07:23:28PM +0100, Lionel Elie Mamane wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 08, 2005 at 06:03:45PM +0000, W. Borgert wrote:
> > According to Christian belief, the bible is the "word of God".
> > According to Nietzsche (in 1882), "God is dead". So the author of
> > the bible is dead since at least 120 years. How can the copyright
> > still hold?
>
> Your argument is flawed: G-od is the direct author of the *original*
> version of *part* the Bible, namely the Pentateuch. The KJV is a
> derivative work made in the early 1600s.
So the authors of the derivative work are certainly also pushing
the daisies.
> More seriously, the copyright still holds because of a special clause
> for it in UK's 1998 Copyright Act (and all earlier copyright acts):
> The Crown has (in the UK) a permanent copyright on it that will never
> expire. (But Parliament can obviously pass new legislation that
> abrogates it.)
Many thanks for the clarification. Interesting, that this does
not seem to be in conflict with the various international trade
agreements...
However, I'm sure, someone will either find or create an
"annotated" variant for which an exceptions seems to exist.
Cheers, WB
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