Perhaps the author of the perlreftut could be persuaded to s/terms of Perl's Artistic License/same terms as Perl itself/. I've seen a lot of files which specify the former, because it used to mean the same thing.

Really? They haven't meant the same thing since Perl was dual licensed. Which happened even before perl4. Same terms as Perl itself means accepting either the Perl's Artistic License, or the GNU Public License.

But note that even if you can get the copyright holder (which isn't the same as the author), to make this change, it's not going to satisfy Debian. And rightly so. Something that is more worrysome for them is that you are only allowed to distribute perlreftut as part of the Perl package, and not separately.

Abigail