[WikiEN-l] Correspondence relating to the copyright status of an image

Sat Jul 16 01:22:11 UTC 2005

On 16/07/05, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> Haukur Þorgeirsson wrote:
> 
> >>Thirdly, I'm genuinely not sure how to
> >>proceed on this matter. This website
> >>guy has still not really said whether
> >>or not he claims to own the copyright
> >>to this image, or to have licensed it
> >>from somebody who does.
> >>
> >>
> >
> >If he holds the copyright to that image
> >then I hold the copyright to the King
> >James Bible.
> >
> >
> IIRC didn't King James I grant a perpetual copyright to Oxford for that
> book?

It's very weird...

Basically, James VI (being a canny - and perpetually bankrupt - Scot)
wanted to get as much money out of the Authorised Version as he could,
when it first was published in 1611. So, he took a patent on it - an
early form of copyright - but arranged to have it vested in the Crown
not the monarch. (In other words, it passes down the generations). As
you can guess, the monarch being the only source for the legally
mandated religious book of the nation... it's a money-spinner, all
right.

This right then went to the Royal Printer, under a 1557 charter, so
they got to do all the printing (presumably skimming the profits;
these posts were often sinecures).

However, Cambridge had, in 1534, managed to obtain a charter which
gave them the right to print and sell "all manner of books" (this
right was strictly controlled back then), with the idea being that if
the Vice-Chancellor had approved a book, it'd probably pass the royal
censors anyway. They didn't do much with this for a long time, but
they appointed printers regularly anyway on principle.

And then the KJV came along. Cambridge argued that since they had a
charter to print *anything*,  they got to evade the patent on the KJV;
they won the argument, and started printing it in 1629. Then it seems
that about ten years later, someone decided that out of a sense of
fairness, Oxford should have the same rights here as Cambridge, and so
they got a similar charter, and permission to print copies of the KJV.

Currently, if memory serves, all UK editions come from OUP or CUP.
There's also a small Scottish printer with a similar right, but I
don't know what happened to them.

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk