On 9/14/06, Delphine Ménard notafishz@gmail.com wrote:
...what do you mean by "country of origin of the piece of work"?
I'm French, I take a picture in Germany of anAmerican work of art that's public domain in the US but not in Germany. Which law applies?
/me is lost.
Which law applies depends where you are publishing the work. If you were publishing it in Germany then you would have to deal with the fact that it is not PD. If you were publishing it in the US then you would not.
"Country of origin" generally means "the place where something is being published and thus where it is likely to end up in court." Thinking about things as "where would I be before a judge?" is a good way of thinking about jurisdictional issues, even though with international treaties that itself is not always foolproof.
My problem with the example page given is that it gave the appearance that a given contributor could license their works differently in different countries (i.e. use free licenses one place and non-free in another). That's clearly against the intent of Commons. I think, though, that an approach which said, "This work is licensed as CC-BY-SA" and then have a way to indicate that either "this only applies in countries X, Y, and Z, because of such-and-such legal condition" or "this does not apply in country X, because of such-and-such legal condition." An example of this are photos of copyrighted architecture, which in the USA (and I think Germany) are explicitly said not to be copyright infringement, but in France and some other countries are considered derivative works. So a photo of the Eiffel tower at night could say, "GFDL in the USA and Germany; in France elements of this could be considered copyright so-and-so."
I'm not sure a large and free-form table is the best way to accomplish this. I think it will confuse people. I think perhaps though that if we agree on certain issues (say, the architecture one), we could make specific templates relating just to those instances. They should be relatively limited in scope.
(The "free in the USA" requirement is necessary in any case, since the Wikimedia servers "publish" the content from the USA. Whether it is sufficient is a different question all together.)
FF