On Monday 29 October 2007 23:42, MJ Ray wrote: > Lars Wirzenius <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > ti, 2007-10-23 kello 09:44 -0500, Steve Greenland kirjoitti: > > > But the license on the package itself doesn't make that > > > restriction. > > > > If I have understood things correctly, in England (and the rest of > > the UK?) the copyright is owned by the crown and therefore it is the > > crown that sets the license. [...] > > But don't trust me on this, I am merely speculating. > > AFAICT, that's incorrect: this restriction is from the letters patent, > not the copyright (which has long since expired). Wikipedia seems to > have been corrected on this since I last looked. > > Also, it's also not clear whether the patent is actively enforced and > it's well-known as not enforced against most printing outside the UK > (the KJV is frequently printed in the US, for example, isn't it?) even > by Englishmen. > > So, does debian really need to remove packages of such importance > because of a trivially-avoidable not-obviously-enforced patent?
Queen Elizabeth II authorised William Collins of Glasgow to print my copy of the Scotish* version of the Authorised Vesion of the Old and New Testaments, under the same Letters Patent granted by Queen Victoria in 1839. I do not think that Her Majesty and her advisers would be worried about electronic copies, they could well take a different stand on printed versions. *While the version for the Church of Scotland is the most common and is the version under discussion, it is a shortened version of the original. Phil. -- Philip Charles; 39a Paterson Street, Abbotsford, Dunedin, New Zealand +64 3 488 2818 Fax +64 3 488 2875 Mobile 027 663 4453 [EMAIL PROTECTED] - personal. [EMAIL PROTECTED] - business -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]