I dislike the idea of this because there is no 1-to-1 correspondence between language and country. en.wp is the Wikipedia of choice for most of the world. So which country's laws to adopt? Chinese, French, Arabic.. many languages have this fact. Australia has some looser copyright limits than the US for pre-1955 material, and it doesn't seem right to restrict use of these by applying American laws to them.
I still think the principle of adopting the laws of the country of origin (of the piece of work, not uploader) makes the most sense. I see the German Wikipedia has a copy of the Australian Aboriginal flag, despite its copyrighted status in Australia. This disturbs me to no small extent - the statement of 'public domain' seems patently a lie... so probably I also have to accept that 'simple' logos that originate in Germany are indeed uncopyrightable.
Brianna
On 14/09/06, Cary Bass bastique@bellsouth.net wrote:
On Thursday, September 07, 2006 9:14 AM, Alison Wheeler wrote:
I've put up an idea of what I meant as a status table at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:AlisonW/Licensestatustest Obviously a template solution would be used to get the countries and standard texts inserted, but it might work and also provides us with a caveat for when (rather than if!) images get used where they shouldn't be ...
Alison Wheeler
I encourage everyone to visit the example that Alison created and share their thoughts on this possible solution for multi-licensing. Something like this may go some ways to solving some of our concerns.
Cary Bass
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