David Monniaux wrote:
As a member of the board of Wikimedia France, I had a
meeting with the
head and the legal counsel of some society of authors, [...]
Their legal counsel told me that their stance is that all legal
conditions stating that the author cedes all rights for an unbounded
duration are abusive and that they were ready to fight that in court if
necessary.
[...]
An important point is that for the last 150 years, French
copyright law has been (at least in theory, practice is
different, see below) centered around the idea of an *author*
making a *work of the mind* which is his *property*. The author
then authorizes *each use* of the work.
There are many kinds of authors. In Sweden, each kind of authors
(novelist, poets, composers, schoolbook writers, ...) has a
separate organization, and none can speak for authors/creators of
all kinds. And then many people occasionally write without being
part of any organization. Letters to the editor are published
without any remuneration. Is that different in France?
If a (freelance) contributor of articles for an encyclopedia would
not sell "full rights" for unbounded duration, the encyclopedia
publisher would be in an absurd situation. In most cases --
correct me if I'm wrong -- the following editions of the same
encyclopedia will reuse and modify the text without asking new
permission from the old author. So is there any organization
where French contributors to traditional encyclopedias (typically
university professors) discuss the terms and conditions under
which they license their articles to the publisher?
Another important issue is that this whole debate is
not
France-centered. "Copyright" as practiced in the US is largely an
American conception
Even though this argument is often heard, the same kinds of works
(novels, songs, newspapers, encyclopedias) exist in all countries,
always written by people and published by publishers. So the
situation doesn't seem to be very different in reality. It seems
that Creative Commons has been fully adopted to the French legal
framework,
http://creativecommons.org/worldwide/fr/
--
Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se)
Aronsson Datateknik -
http://aronsson.se