[WikiEN-l] Copyright question

[John Vandenberg]

On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 6:55 PM, David Gerard<dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2009/7/20 FT2 <ft2.wiki at gmail.com>:
>
>> Are UK legal rulings public domain? Or just US rulings?
>
>
> I understand that Wikisource treats all laws everywhere as public
> domain; don't know about court rulings.

David is correct.  English Wikisource does not have the a rule "must
be PD in the country of origin", as we like the nice clear lines of
PD-1923 and PD-GovEdict.

In the US, all laws (inc foreign) are public domain, and in the UK the
laws may be reproduced with a few restrictions, such as not including
images of seals and requiring accuracy.  So modification is not
permitted by UK residents (no UK vandals permitted) but it is PD in
the US jurisdiction, meaning modification is permitted, and so it
sneaks in the back door of the freedomdefined.org definition.

I would need to check whether UK residents are legally permitted to
put their laws on Wikisource - there is a  restriction that the
website needs to have obtained permission, but I dont recall if it
applies in this situation.

The Graves' Case is from 1869, so crown copyright has expired.  (crown
copyright is very different as the crown doesn't die.)

iirc Wikisource doesnt have any UK court rulings so that issue hasn't
been raised.  We do have a few AUS court rulings, and iirc they are
still covered by crown copyright, and they might even have been
contributed or improved by an Australian.

--
John Vandenberg