On Wed, Oct 1, 2008 at 7:14 AM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
<cimonavaro(a)gmail.com> wrote:
geni wrote:
2008/9/30 John Vandenberg
<jayvdb(a)gmail.com>om>:
Absurd. Most recently written copyright laws are
very clear that laws
and judicial opinions are in the public domain. add Israel and
Azerbaijan to the growing list appearing in this thread.
Okey. As I've said I'm more familiar with British based law than
French based (is Azerbaijan Russian based?). The problem is that
British does not have PD laws and has never done so which means that
anyone with an English law based legal system who hasn't updated the
relevant sections will not have PD laws. Rather a lot of countries
have English law based legal systems.
Not okay. This is just absurd. It is ludicrous to assume that every
country which is based on English law, will have jumped over the cliff
after it, and balked from safeguarding itself from copyright silliness.
It was in 1911 that commonwealth countries were given the option of
defining their own copyright laws. As far as I know, all have
radically revised their law, but many still have the 1911 law in
effect for works before the new laws were enacted. Wikisource also
has a project to produce a text of the 1911 copyright act. We need
help proofreading this vital law.
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Index:The_copyright_act,_1911,_annotated.djvu
The UK gov only provides a revised edition, which doesnt help us
understand what copyright law is in effect in commonwealth countries
which enacted their own laws at different years, and thus based on
different editions of the UK law. Here is the revised law:
http://www.opsi.gov.uk/RevisedStatutes/Acts/ukpga/1911/cukpga_19110046_en_1
The UK gov only provide originals for a small subset of laws prior to 1998.
http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts.htm
--
John V
Heh. This does sort of make me interested in a further enquiry though...
Are all the countries which base their law on the english system still
members of the commonwealth?
And no, this is not an idle question or asked merely rhetorically. I
really don't know.
For that matter, could not, and did not some countries base their legal
system on the english laws, and never ever were members of the
kingdom/empire/commonwealth in the first place? I could easily imagine a
country devising a legal system modeled after the English legal
framework, which actually never came under the crown itself.
Yours,
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen