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Re: Computer generated Almanac
From: Gordon Talge
Date: 2003 Sep 9, 18:04 -0700
From: Gordon Talge
Date: 2003 Sep 9, 18:04 -0700
George Huxtable wrote: > >The following United States government work is excepted from the above > >notice, and no copyright is claimed for it in the United States: > >cover, title page and reverse, Preface, pages 6 and 7, pages 286 to 315. > > He concluded- > > >So it looks like the U.S. version of the NA is not copyrighted. > >Not being a lawyer I am not sure how this works out. > > Here Gordon seems to have misled himself. That exception, exactly as it > says, applies only to those specific pages, presumably because those pages > (mainly, the sight-reduction tables) are the contribution of the US > Government. Every bit of the rest of the Almanac is subject to the > preceding international-copyright declaration, to US citizens as to > everyone else, being the work of a UK Government agency which claims its > copyright. Not being a lawyer, it is hard to say what it means. There is no U.S. copyright notice. Moreover, it would seem strange that the U.S. Government would print and freely distribute an Almanac copyrighted by another government. ( I have seen however nautical charts marked "Confidential for US Government use only" and it turned out they were just reprints of BA charts by the US and if you wanted a copy of the "confidential" chart you could just buy it from the British ). What about the paperback commercial edition that is distributed in the US by Celestaire and others? Also it says at the top UNITED STATES For sale by the U.S. Government Printing Office etc. Nothing about a copyright until after the words UNITED KINGDOM. This makes me think that the copyright of the daily almanac stuff does not apply in the United States. I would of course check with a copyright lawyer before I tried to make and distribute an almanac using the material from the NA. -- Gordon ,,, (. .) +-------------------------ooO-(_)-Ooo------------------------+ | Gordon Talge WB6YKK e-mail: gtalge@pe.net | | (o- Debian / GNU / Linux | | //\ The Choice of the GNU Generation | | v_/_ .oooO | | - E Aho Laula - ( ) Oooo. - Wider is Better - | +-------------------------\ (---( )-------------------------+ \_) ) / (_/