I wasn't referring to a copyright provision, I was referring to their other well-known restrictive laws. I'm not sure I buy the "ethical validity" argument, in part because I'm not so sure I, in my heart of hearts, think that copyright is about ethics much these days (and suspect that Iran's lack of participation in foreign copyright agreements is done so more for their own benefit -- not having to pay foreign copyright holders -- than it does in inducing any loss-of-profit for the Iranian government or Iranian citizens).
But anyway -- my response was just meant to say, "Well, I don't think we're legally bound to follow Iranian laws on this or much anything else." Even if that's *true* (I'm the first to admit I'm not very well versed in international law), it doesn't *necessarily* imply any particular course of action. The censorship example was just to illustrate that if we tried to follow every country's individual content laws about everything, we'd have no encyclopedia.
FF
On 8/7/05, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
There is some ethical validity to respecting Iranian copyright law whether or not an obligation exists. Iran's failure to participate in international treaties on the matter should not be a primary concern. Infringement of Iranian copyrights are still infringements even if US courts would not consider those laws. Copyright terms in Iran (life + 30) are still shorter than in most countries, so there would be no need to extend them beyond that time. I'm not aware of any Iranian copyright provision regarding the depiction of women, and you admit that you don't know about that either. That aspect seems like a red herring.
Ec
Fastfission wrote:
Well the English servers are in the USA, which means they are subject to US law, not Iranian law. If we *were* subject to Iranian law, I'm betting there are a number of other Iranian laws we are already breaking! I don't know the Iranian laws about depictions of women but I'm willing to bet they've got a few that we're well afoul of.
FF
On 8/8/05, Roozbeh Pournader roozbeh@gmail.com wrote:
On 8/6/05, Fastfission fastfission@gmail.com wrote:
Why not make a special tag template for this? Something along the lines
of:
"This image, produced by the current government of Iran, are believed to not fall under U.S. copyright laws as Iran is not a member of WIPO. Should this change, though, the usage of this image is still believed to fall under the "fair use" clause of U.S. copyright law. Use in mediums other than on the servers of the English-language Wikipedia, hosted in the United States by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, may not be exempt from either of these requirements."
There are problems with that:
- I believe the Wikimedia Foundation would be breaking Iranian law by
distributing those material to Iran, that is, serving its pages to Iranian readers. If it wishes to use the material, it should block Iran from its readership. 2) It's not only the government, and other Iranians may wish to sue the Wikimedia Foundation.
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