Anthere a écrit :
Yann Forget wrote:
Hi,
I think that there are several areas where the projects would benefit from a more proactive help from the Foundation. I will speak about
two here:
- Legal counselling.
Some projects (mainly Commons and Wikisource) need more input about copyright issues from knowledgeable persons. I have asked twice to juriwiki-l specific issues for Wikisource without receiving an answer, even an acknowledgement that my request was received. Another concrete example: Commons and Wikisource would benefit most from a cross table about copyright rules, which countries use "most favourable rule apply", etc.
For various reasons, which are controversial, some consider the Foundation should not give such advice. As such, your requests will probably not meet answers.
Is there any possibility between professional legal advice and no advice at all? Here we don't need professional legal advice, but rather general information about how copyright laws from different countries works together.
For my practical use, is a photograph taken in India in 1908 by a Indian photographer is public domain in USA (first published in India)? and if it is taken in 1920? in 1945? and if the photographer is American (first published in USA)? and if the photographer is from a third country, England, for example? (Indian copyright law is "public domain 60 years after publication" for photographs and sound recordings).
- Helping small projects. It seems that some projects have a difficult
start. Indian languages projects are my first examples. I will go to India in January, and I would like to use this opportunity to recruit new contributors. The Foundation could help coordinate this kind of recruitement.
Why not. Practically speaking, how do you think the Foundation could help ? What do you mean by "coordination" here ? Example of things we could do ?
As Mickael Bimmer mentionned, the coordination might be the work of the language subcommittee. I subscribed to the list and created an account on the wiki. ;o)
More generally, I would like to know how far the Foundation as an organisation is willing to get involved into active promotion for small projects and new languages. Can the recruitement be made in the name of the Foundation or not? Can I make leaflets saying "the Wikimedia Foundation is looking for new contributors for Indian languages"?
Ant
Regards,
Yann
Yann Forget wrote:
For my practical use, is a photograph taken in India in 1908 by a Indian photographer is public domain in USA (first published in India)? and if it is taken in 1920? in 1945? and if the photographer is American (first published in USA)? and if the photographer is from a third country, England, for example? (Indian copyright law is "public domain 60 years after publication" for photographs and sound recordings).
Two major problems here: * In many cases, copyright questions may be resolved only on a case-by-case basis. For instance, in many countries, copyright only protects "works of the mind" with no exhaustive and clear definition of what a work of the mind is, and it is possible that certain technical photographs are not works of the mind that can be protected by copyright. However, deciding whether this is the case for a particular photograph will entail examining details related to the photographic process, and thus no clear-cut global answer can be provided.
* In many cases, what we intend to do simply has not been tested in court. People often mistakenly believe that there are things that are "legal" vs things that are "prohibited" and thus that lawyers can tell us which is which. In reality, there are things clearly legal, those clearly illegal, and things in between for which a lawyer may only give some kind of educated guess of whether that would fly in court (which in turn depends on how well we argue our case in court).
Both of this clash with the expectations of many of our users and admins, that is, to get black and white "yes / no" answers to legal queries.
On 12/14/06, Yann Forget yann@forget-me.net wrote:
For my practical use, is a photograph taken in India in 1908 by a Indian photographer is public domain in USA (first published in India)? and if it is taken in 1920?
eh probably.
in 1945?
Probably not or at least it would be so compelx to show that it is PD that it would be unlikely to be worth the effort.
and if the photographer is American (first published in USA)?
Probably, probably, probably not.
and if the photographer is from a third country, England, for example?
It depends