Hi John,

Congratulations on your new position! 
Taking the opportunity, I was wondering if there could be any development on reverting or challenging the results of the 2004 Hamburg Court decision on this case: https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Oberlandesgericht_Hamburg_-_U-Boot_Foto_1941 - If I correctly understood it, a photo of a submarine published in 1943 had its copyright expired in 1968 (25 years after publication, as was the law then). In 2004, that sentence forced it again into copyright, using the argument that it was theoretically still protected in some other European countries, in particular in Spain, which had the most protective law (80 years), claiming the photograph was still protected in Spain at the EU copyright harmonization date - also using an old sentence related to a Phill Collins UK copyright claim to expand foreign copyright into Germany, so that the theoretical foreign Spanish copyright protection would in turn also apply in Germany, therefore actually importing the old Spanish copyright law into Germany.
This sentence is a constant source of trouble, not only for German works before 1996, which apparently now follow the old Spanish copyright law (!!), but for others that have nothing to do with that court, like Portugal, as people recurrently try to apply the German case to everyone else. 

If this happens to be something in your sphere of influence... Anyway, here it is, just in case.

Thanks,
Paulo


John Hendrik Weitzmann <john.weitzmann@wikimedia.de> escreveu no dia quarta, 12/04/2023 à(s) 06:33:
Hi all,

here's a little announcement for y'all: I'll be changing jobs in May, leaving the general counsel job at WMDE in order to work as a lawyer in the German federal ministry of the interior, in a department  called digital society and information technology (abbreviated DG). My future team lead asked me whether people would see this as 'moving to the dak side', but I reassured her that policy Wikimedians are way too professional to misunderstand it that way ;)  In DG I'll have opportunity to work on some of the very same government projects that we at WMDE tried to influence, and I'm pretty sure that they hire me at least in part because of that civil society background. So, if it is in fact dark over there in certain ways, they seem to strive for some additional light through recruitment (several people from NGOs were hired recently).

As of now, I don't really know much about how close the DG department is to what the German government does in the Council and to European affairs in general. Much of that is done by / through the foreign ministry. But if you have specific suggestions or wishes around data policy in Germany and such, let me know. I cannot of course guarantee anything, but as mentioned above, there seems to be openness for the civil society mindset and good ideas are hard to stop. And, simultaneously to me moving to the ministry, the policy team at WMDE is now complete, with the last vacancy filled, There's now more people power available at WMDE for wikimedian policy work than ever before. That, plus all of you (plus WMEU as a platform) will help shape digital policy that benefits Free Knowledge. At some point I might re-join as a volunteer, still to be figured out, and there will probably be a replacement GC at WMDE soon to help with legistic stuff.

In the mantime, find me on LinkedIn or get in touch via private email at jhweitzmann@web.de, yours

John
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