[Commons-l] An international perspective on sweat-of-the-brow

Before everyone declares WWIII, it should be made clear that there is no "correct" answer to this problem. Not only is sweat-of-the-brow inconsistent between different countries, it is inconsistent _within_ many common law countries (including the UK). The only thing that is well-established is that the U.S. doesn't apply sweat-of-the-brow and has a relatively high threshold-of-originality (a separate, but related concept). Regarding the UK, most legal scholars agree on the following: * U.K. courts have historically recognized sweat-of-the-brow * The written law in the U.K. has recently become less friendly to application of sweat-of-the-brow * Application of sweat-of-the-brow has been declining (or disappeared entirely) in all former Commonwealth countries, a trend which the U.K. courts are well aware of * There has been no clear-cut definitive decision regarding this issue in the U.K. in recent history So what does this boil down to? Basically, that no one has any idea if sweat-of-the-brow is still a solid legal doctrine in the U.K. or not. Nor does anyone have a clear idea of what the threshold-of-originality is in the U.K. Regardless of whether the U.K. is a sweat-of-the-brow country or not, there are certainly countries that are. In Taiwan, Spain, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Finland, etc., Adam probably has a copyright on his restorations whether he wants them or not. In these cases, is it better for him to retain full copyright or apply a CC-BY-SA license? This is the exact same situation I was in with the 2D Walters Museum uploads. Even though I explicitly declared that the images were CC-BY-SA _only_ in sweat-of-the-brow countries, the Commons community went ape-shit over the Walters Museum committing "copyfraud" by not simply applying PD-Art. So basically, the choice for an uploader is either be accused of copyfraud or retain your full copyrights in sweat-of-the-brow countries (which may include the U.K.). This seems like a pretty silly situation, but I'm not sure what the solution is. Should we really insist on PD-Art tags when the author wants to make their work CC-BY or CC-BY-SA? Whether or not PD-Art is "more free" depends on which country you are in, so there is no clean and easy solution. Ryan Kaldari On 7/9/12 5:11 PM, Cary Bass wrote: