[Commons-l] Old works in public domain vs. US Copyright Law

[Petr Kadlec]

Hi!

When "investigating" the copyright status of some old images, I
realized that our {{PD-old}} template is quite a bit misleading.

IIANM (note: IANAL), works published after 1923 by authors who died
between 1926 and 1936 (i.e. dead more than 70 years) are _not_ public
domain in US (and will not be until at least 2019 [1]), although they
are PD in EU states (among others). And as the US law is quite
relevant to the WMF servers, we must consider those works to be
copyrighted.

The copyright status of an old work is therefore determined not only
by the death date of its author, but also by its publishing date and
our templates (and procedures) should acknowledge that. (See also
[[commons:Commons talk:Licensing/Which copyright law applies?]])

Unfortunately, I cannot imagine we would be able to explain the
difficult rules on the upload form so that anyone would understand
them. The need for a wizard-style upload is evident once again…

P. S. I must say I am afraid that this fact about US copyright law is
ignored (not known) on more projects which consider works by authors
who died before 1936 as PD regardless of the publishing date.

-- [[cs:User:Mormegil | Petr Kadlec]]

[1] See e.g. [[en:Wikipedia:Non-US copyrights]]