Talk:Crown copyright

Citation
Added a citation to "exceptions" as well as "raw data" exception with citation, feel free to comment if I made any mistakes:) --Walshnic (talk) 23:37, 15 June 2018 (UTC)
 * Will be doing more edits using this source: Judge, E. F. (2011). Crown copyright and the reuse of government information: Access and limitations. In P. Garvin (Ed.), Government information management in the 21st century : International perspectives (pp. 211-222). Burlington, VT: Ashgate Pub --Walshnic (talk) 22:12, 7 July 2018 (UTC)

Scottish Parliament
''When the Copyrights Designs and Patents Act 1988 (the 1988 Act) came into force the scope of the definition of Crown copyright was considerably reduced. Crown copyright was ... also defined as subsisting "in every Act of Parliament, Act of the Scottish Parliament, Act of the Northern Ireland Assembly or Measure of the General Synod of the Church of England".''

Is this true? Bearing in mind that the Scottish Parliament didn't come into being until 1999, how can legislation pre-dating the creation of the parliament apply to it? Likewise with the Northern Ireland Assembly. 80.175.243.130 14:43, 19 May 2005 (UTC)


 * It's called amending the law. David Newton 20:44, 6 November 2005 (UTC)
 * In which case the relevant amending Act(s) should be cited as well. Hairy Dude 19:21, 5 February 2006 (UTC)
 * Yes, otherwise this just looks like an error, and is at least going to confuse various readers.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  17:57, 9 June 2024 (UTC)

Canada copyright in judicial decisions
I've removed the comment about how "Jockey v. Standen" gives Judicial authority that judgments can't be copyrighted. I read the case and I am doubtful that it does such a thing. The only comment on the subject is in a concurring opinion at the end in paragraph 12:
 * HUTCHEON J.A.:— I agree with Mr. Justice Macdonald that this appeal must be dismissed for the reasons given by him. The only thing that I would add is that there may be cases where the publication of material becomes part of the public domain either because of a statutory requirement to publish the material or because it is inherent in the circumstances that to recognize the claim to copyright would be contrary to public policy.  A judge's reasons for judgment may be an example of the latter...

The concurring comment is speculative and is not very pursuasive let alone binding, so I think it's unreasonable to say that it gives judicial authority. -PullUpYourSocks 21:22, 15 July 2005 (UTC)

UK white paper

 * "However, some documents have Crown Copyright waived by the government, subject to certain conditions. This was introduced in a white paper in 2000 in order to improve access to government publications."

Would this be the Freedom of Information Act 2000? If so, that is an enacted Act of Parliament which has now been in force for over a year, not just a White Paper. Hairy Dude 19:20, 5 February 2006 (UTC)


 * No, this is something quite separate from the FOIA. The waiver is a policy decision, not a formal change of law.  The details of the waiver (including its exceptions) can be found on the website of the official Office of Public Sector Information website.

Canada update
Cleaned up commentary, and eliminated essay style, which was copied from another source. Exceptions to the general rule have been converted to a tabular format.Raellerby (talk) 16:44, 4 October 2011 (UTC)

UK Crown copyright and GDFL
I excised this sentence: ''Websites are reproducible unless otherwise indicated, but Her Majesty's Stationery Office (HMSO) has stated in correspondence that they do not consider material under Crown Copyright redistributable under such licenses as the GFDL. ''

I excised it for two reasons: 1 - it seems to contradict what is stated here as regards public records (CAVEAT - I could be completely wrong in my interpretation, I'm no lawyer) and 2 - it makes reference to "correspondence" which is uncited.

By all means fix and reinstate. Manning (talk) 04:46, 4 February 2012 (UTC)

Paper on Crown copyright debate
I found a paper on the politics of Crown copyright. We should incorporate the main points of this paper into the section on #Criticisms. Qzekrom 💬 theythem 19:25, 17 March 2019 (UTC)
 * It is a closed article, so I and I imagine almost all others cannot read anything beyond the abstract, so it is difficult to tell what exactly can or should be added. trackratte (talk) 19:11, 18 March 2019 (UTC)
 * Sorry. I haven't read the whole thing yet, but I probably assumed that anyone could access the paper if they wanted. If you want a copy of the paper, I can email it to you or you can visit WikiProject Resource Exchange/Resource Request. Qzekrom 💬 theythem 23:01, 18 March 2019 (UTC)
 * Try also WP:The Wikipedia Library; you can get access to lots of paywalled academic material, including much of OUP's output.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  17:57, 9 June 2024 (UTC)

Is the European Union section relevant in this article?
Apokrif (talk) 18:12, 29 May 2021 (UTC)
 * Yes, but only for the period in which the UK was an EU member. We just need to add a sentence that specified this date range.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  16:49, 9 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Done.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  16:56, 9 June 2024 (UTC)

Weird language, and claim that needs moderating
Our article presently says However, since 2001 the UK Government has developed a trend of automatically licensing all works published on gov.uk and The National Archives under the Open Government Licence.

First off, "has developed a trend of" is meaningless buzzword blather. What is this really trying to say?

Second, various sites under gov.uk are not following this. E.g., ScotlandsPeople.gov.uk not only charges money for almost every form of record it provides, it attaches usually bogus crown copyright claims to all of them.

An aside on why they are bogus: Copyright in the UK did not exist in any form until 1710, and crown copyright did not exist until 1911, but does not retroactively cover governmental works before that date; and while it was extended in 1958 to cover more types of works produced at governmental expense, its scope was contracted again in 1988. More importantly, in 2000, the UK government disavowed imposition of any licensing requirements for 10 classes of documents, including "forms, ... documents featured on official departmental Web sites, ... and unpublished public records", and the sort of material genealogists are after on UK government sites like this one (birth/marriage/death records, wills and their adjudication, other legal records) qualifies under all three of those categories. The bulk of it also pre-dates any crown copyright term that could potentially have existed at some time anyway. Furthermore, the majority of the records in the present or former UK that are of interest to genealogists created before civil registration was imposed 1837 in England and Wales, 1855 in Scotland, 1864 (1845 for non-Catholics) in Ireland, were not created with any government involvement at all, but were produced by parish churches. So, even if a parliament of competent jurisdiction unwisely created some kind of retroactive governmental copyright, it still would not include many of the documents genealogists are typically looking for at ScotlandsPeople and similar agency websites.

ScotlandsPeople is empowered by the Scottish Parliament to charge some "document" processing fees even when it's simply automatically popping PDFs out of a database and no human labour is involved. But let's see the actual statute and what it says. Where is it? This is pretty shady, since a freedom-of-information request, involving dead-trees paperwork and a bunch of real-human time on both ends, could compel that agency to divulge the same data.

And it is not the only one doing this. I ran into another a few days ago (not NationalArchives.gov.uk, at which documents are generally free, as long as you create a free account to which to attach them for download). I forgot to take note of which other UK agency was charging, but I recall that they made a specific claim that they were statutorily required to do so. Of course, they did not actually name the allenged statute, and this appears to be a false statement, unless there really is a strange and very particular piece of legislation requiring one very specific agency to charge the public for one very specific sort of information. So, where is it?

Whatever the situational particulars are for certain agency/department websites, our material at present is making too broad a claim about the UK's approach to public records access, and needs to be clearer that while there may be some kind of vague "administrative support or preference" high up in the government for releasing material under the OGL, various lower-level agencies are not playing along, and are [ab]using public-records access as a revenue stream. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  16:47, 9 June 2024 (UTC)