On 24 Oct 2011, at 12:41, Mark Goodge wrote: > On 24/10/2011 12:27, Matt Robinson wrote: >> >> Whose copyright is relevant here? I'd previously considered that all >> documents >> retrieved from Companies House were covered by Crown Copyright, not the >> document creators'. > > No, not at all. Sending a document to Companies House (or any other statutory > body) does not transfer copyright of that document to the recipient. What it > may do (and, in the case of documents which CH is obliged to publish, must > do) is grant CH a perpetual non-exclusive licence to publish them. But it > does not necessarily confer any similar licence on anyone else.
That figures. The content of these filed accounts must be supplied by law, and made available to the public (also by law), so I suppose that if the accounts were filed on a CH-defined form, rather than free-form (with required content), then this wouldn't be an issue. It'd be absurd to claim copyright on a tax form you'd filled out, right? Or my census form. Obviously there are many other reasons it'd be nice if CH supplied company accounts in a format that wasn't a photographic scan of the submitted documents saved as a bizarre multi-layer TIF; copyright is the least of them. DueDil have the processed figures presented as interactive graphs and tables, almost certainly transcribed by battery hens in an off-shore data-entry farm operated by Dun & Bradstreet*. It's a shame that we can't afford to do the same. -- Matt Robinson http://inanimatt.com/ * Just guessing; it might be monkeys. _______________________________________________ developers-public mailing list [email protected] https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/listinfo/developers-public Unsubscribe: https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/options/developers-public/archive%40mail-archive.com
