On 8 June 2014 12:21, matanya matanya@foss.co.il wrote:
Hello,
Commons licensing policy determines media should be free in source country and in US. I want to propose We change the policy to be: "free in source country" only, and to cope with US laws where the servers are hosted found a "DMCA take down notice" Team in OTRS, that will handle requests to remove Items that are non-free in the US after verifying proper grounds for the claim.
This approach to copyright will prevent issues like URAA issues, shorter term issues and restored copyright issues.
No it it won't. UK restored a bunch of copyrights when EU went life+70
It will enrich commons with many files that are FREE (mostly PD) in source country, but not on commons due to US laws. Unless the copyright holder (mostly Gov's and archives) will not request removal, and they won't since they released the media, we will be using those files.
If the government held the copyright then you contact them and ask them about their position on potential overseas copyrights.
I'm not a lawyer, so I probably missed most of the legal implication, But I do volunteer to found and lead the team, if this idea is accepted and commons community would want this policy change. I'm seeking input from copyright experienced users and lawyers, before i start an official policy change on commons.
The main problem that you hit is that "free in source country and in US" is a pretty good proxy for "free pretty much anywhere" (well unless the source country is the US but that's a separate problem). For example depending on how you read Saudi law there are a bunch of photos that are free in Saudi Arabia and pretty much nowhere else (Switzerland perhaps) but unless our resuser know their way around over 100 copyright systems they probably aren't going to know that. Thus from a reuse POV commons goes from being useful (as long as you allow for US weirdness) to being (from a copyright perspective) a radioactive mess.