I have updated
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:PD-Afghanistan
in an attempt to be compliant with US law and started a discussion about this at:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump#PD-Afghanistan
The prior template, and the way it appeared to be used in some cases, seemed to suggest that any image taken inside Afghanistan was PD. This is of course not the case. Hopefully my updates at least address the minimum legal issues.
I'm not at all convinced that having PD-Afghanistan (or any comparable PD templates on other projects) is a good thing, but at the very least such templates need to be consistent with Berne / US laws regarding the treatment of content from non-treaty states. In my opinion, the larger ethical issues still deserve further consideration though.
-Robert Rohde
On Thu, Feb 23, 2012 at 10:29 AM, Michael Snow wikipedia@frontier.com wrote:
On 2/23/2012 9:37 AM, Robert Rohde wrote:
Under US copyright law (and more generally the Berne Convention), establishing that a work is in the public domain due to a lack of treaty status requires meeting several requirements, and those templates only address the most obvious one. These requirements are:
- The work was first published in a country that has no copyright
relations with the US. 2) None of the authors of the work are citizens of any country that does have copyright relations with the US. 3) Within thirty days of publication in the non-treaty state, the work was never also published in any other state that does have copyright relations with the US.
Regarding the second point, the coverage is actually even broader than citizenship, it includes residency. So if one of the authors is an Iranian exile living in Turkey, the work may be subject to copyright protection in the US even if it was published only in Iran.
I think it's interesting to note that although the approach under discussion may seem like a mechanical application of law and entirely neutral on its face, the scenario I've indicated suggests that its structural effects could be far from neutral, with significant political consequences. Basically, it means that when a country that does not participate in international copyright agreements, to the extent that it may be a repressive and often censorious regime whose opponents are commonly forced into expatriate life, we could be indiscriminately republishing works acceptable to the regime while taking a much more restrictive approach to works from a dissident perspective.
--Michael Snow
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l