David Monniaux said: "only in 2006 it was established for sure that rights to works done by civil servants as part of their duties belonged to their employer;"
No, it is the opposite. The new French Intellectual Property Code says that the civil servant author remains the copyright owner of his work whenever the work is used outside government purposes. See articles L111-1 and L131-3-1 of the Code. So for the Wikimedia projects' purposes, the copyright holder is the civil servant himself or herself, not the government.
Only in rare cases when the purposes of the Wikimedia projects and the purposes of the French government overlap, could the government be considered as being the copyright holder.
L111-1: http://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichCode.do?idSectionTA=LEGISCTA000006161633... L131-3-1: http://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichCodeArticle.do?cidTexte=LEGITEXT00000606...
2009/9/22, Yann Forget yann@forget-me.net:
Hello, I think this is worth a larger audience. Yann
-------- Original Message -------- Subject: [Commons-l] a heads-up on Wikimedia France's adventures with the French cultural authorities Date: Tue, 22 Sep 2009 18:51:12 +0200 From: David Monniaux <David . Monniaux @ free . fr> To: commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org [...] Note that it is not out of ill will that museums and other institutions refuse to release pictures under a free license. There are some legal difficulties involved - sometimes they do not own the rights to the pictures (only in 2006 it was established for sure that rights to works done by civil servants as part of their duties belonged to their employer; also, they sometimes employ private photographers), and