On 9/8/06, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
Today a US user could legally upload modern works published only in Iran, and they would be legal in most of the world.... but they would be illegal in Iran. If we fill the Persian language Wikipedia with these images, would we be succeeding at producing a free content encyclopedia in that language?
Excellent point. Leaving aside the black/white free/nonfree issue, I don't think it'd be a smart idea to *unnecessarily* fill the encyclopedia with a lot of images that a lot of the potential users can't reuse.
I'm less sure about whether or not it's OK to put these images in the French encyclopedia (for example), though. I imagine there are very few people in Iran who would be interested in a French encyclopedia. And if it's OK to put the images in most encyclopedias, but not in a few of them, then should the image be in commons?
What happens next week if Iran signs the Berne Convention?
I'd be interested in the answer to that question. If the copyright automatically becomes valid in most countries, even for pre-existing works, then obviously these images are unusable in any language Wikipedia. Is that what happens?
Instead we should conform strictly to the laws of the uploaders location and to the laws of where the servers are hosted...
I'd say the uploaders are responsible for conforming strictly to the laws of their location, not "us". It would be far too complicated to try to figure out where people are uploading from and then what laws apply there.
and then attempt to conform to the laws of all places someone may wish to publish or work to the extent that doing so is both reasonable and not in strong conflict with or projects overall goals.
For some value of "reasonable" I think the vast majority of people agree with this. I do think that value of "reasonable" varies quite a bit from person to person, though.
Anthony