On 9/8/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)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