Delirium wrote:
David Newton wrote:
So, it appears that Crown copyright material that
has been published
in 1954 or earlier is considered public domain worldwide by OPSI and
is thus fair game for the Wikipedia to use.
Certainly good news! The copyright laws are rather complex, so I
suppose it's not impossible that they could in theory lay a claim to
more than 50 years under, say, U.S. copyright law for material
published in the U.S. To avoid that possibility, it may be worth
archiving this response somewhere, since "the copyright owner
explicitly told me I could use it" is a reasonably good defense
against copyright-infringement claims, and at the very least would
likely severely mitigate any damages that might ever arise.
If something is already in the public domain the copyright owner's
permission is of no consequence. It only matters when something is
still protected.
As a rule, no country will grant citizens of another country greater
copyright protection than they do to their own citizens, nor will they
extend the rights of a foreign citizen beyond what he had in his own
country.
Canada is a Berne Convention country which follows the life + 50 rule.
This means that on a worldwide basis a Canadian author's copyrights
expire 50 years after his death notwithstanding foreign laws that would
extend this period to 70 years. Similarly, any foreign author could be
freely republished in Canada 50 years after his death, but that could
not be distributed internationaly to countries with a longer expiry period.
Ec