REVISED PRAYER BOOK
WHO OWNS THE COPYRIGHT?
Another effort was to have been made in the Chuch Assembly meeting to settle the important question of th© ownership of copyright in the Revised Prayer Book. The book, as is generally known, has been printed and widely circulated without the authority of Parliament, which refused to approve it. Parts of the revision are already in use more or less unofficially in various churches. Whatever the decision of the Assembly, it is probable that the position will be formally tested by the publication of some part of the book without the permission of the Central Board of Finance, by whom the copyright is now claimed.
The issue had been raised again by a section of the report of the Central Board of Finance in which it announced that a Prayer Book Copyright Committee has been appointed to administer the property. The announcement contained the followingstatement:
“ft has been held by high authority that the copyright in the Deposited Book of 1928 was vested in the first instance in the House of Bishops, the members of which assigned it to the Central Board of Finance.”
This assertion was to be challenged by a group of members of the Assembly, and notice had been given of the following question: “Who was, the ‘high authority’ who advised the board that the joint authors of the Deposited Book had copyright in it; and why (seeing that the Bishops publicly and frequently declared during the discussion of the book that it was the corporate work of the whole Assembly and not a ‘Bishops’ Book’) he discriminated between the bishops and the othei’ members of the Assembly as joint owners of the copyright under the statute?” If the first claim of the House of Bishops to the copyright in the books were ultimately to be upset as the result of a test action at law, follovzing the unauthorised publication of parts of the book, an important principle would have been established for the future.
Considerable readjustments of contracts entered into between the Central Board of Finance and various publishing houses would, moreover, be necessitated. I
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Bibliographic details
Greymouth Evening Star, 3 August 1929, Page 2
Word Count
356REVISED PRAYER BOOK Greymouth Evening Star, 3 August 1929, Page 2
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