Hello,
Klaus Graf wrote:
There are opinions on Commons that Moeller's statement in this list ("[W]e've consistently held that faithful reproductions of two-dimensional public domain works which are nothing more than reproductions should be considered public domain for licensing purposes") has been "overruled" by Mike Godwin's statement (which was adressed on a Wikisource case)
See http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons_talk:Licensing#About_Bridgeman_vs....
We should not accept such nonsense.
Klaus Graf
Actually, this whole discussion resumes to a very short question: Which law do we apply on Wikimedia projects? No problem to apply US law because WMF is based in USA, but the "source country" has no definitive meaning, so we get into absurb situations:
1. What is the "source country" for an image scanned in France from a book bought in India by a British publisher (real case scenario)? Ultimately, we publish things in USA when we upload images and texts on Wikimedia servers.
Then we have the opposite situation:
1. What about a French book published in France in 1935 from an author who died in 1936? If we consider that US law doesn't apply the rule of shorter term, this book is not in the public domain in USA, although it is in the public domain in France, and was never published in USA.
Why not to apply just common sense?
Yann