Here is the current draft of the letter I will send to HMSO. I plan to send it on 3 July (the mail isn't picked up the following day ;->). Please reply with your comments and suggestions before that date.

Controller and Queen's Printer HMSO St.Clements House 2-16 Colegate Norwich NR3 1BQ

Dear Ms. Tullo:

I am an administrator of the Wikipedia, a multilingual project to create a complete and accurate open content encyclopedia. The English-language version can be seen on the Web at http://www.wikipedia.org/. We gather information from many sources, and government Web sites are often very useful to us. We have reviewed the terms of the Crown copyright, but are still unsure whether we can use that material.

We understand that we can use your material "free of charge in any format or medium provided it is reproduced accurately and not used in a misleading context [and] the source of the material [is] identified and the copyright status acknowledged." Our question centers on the interaction between the Crown copyright and our own. We maintain copyright over the material we create, but license its use under the GNU Free Documentation License, which was designed by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) for free content. The license text can be found at http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html. It stipulates that any copy of the material, even if modified, must carry the same license. Wikipedia is the largest documentation project to use this license.

Thus, under the terms of the GFDL, we cannot pass the Crown copyright restrictions on to third-generation re-copiers. For example, I might copy material from the Royal Navy's site into an article about HMS SCEPTRE, doing so accurately, honestly, and with attribution, but a third party who copied the article onto his Web site, removed the attribution, and somehow altered the information to be deceptive would not be in violation of our license.

As participants in a unique and highly visible project who are freely releasing our work to the public, we are punctilious about respecting copyright. We would be very grateful if you could provide us with a statement of HMSO's opinion on our ability to copy material from HM Government Web sites and relicense it under the GFDL.

I can be contacted by e-mail at sean@epoptic.com, by telephone at 01-310-739-xxxx (I am in time zone UTC-7 -- please call in your late afternoon), and by post at Sean Barrett, xxxx xxxxxx Avenue, Los Angeles CA 90xxx, USA. Thank you very much for your time and consideration.

Sincerely,