On 8/1/06, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Assuming that he's still living in Afghanistan, I believe that that country has never had copyright relations with the United States. That alone would make it public domain under US law. :-)
In other cases (e.g. Iran) we have not considered this legitimately public domain for our purposes. For one thing, if relations with the state were normalised, the copyright status would instantly change; secondly, I feel we should respect the intentions of copyright and not use such a legal loophole. We wouldn't be happy with Iranians and Afghans not respecting our copyright or license, would we?
-Matt