Tomasz Ganicz wrote:
Hello,
There is a problem of potential copyright violation of putting to the
Wikisources and other Wikimedia projects encyclis and other documents
signed by Pope. According to:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,13509-2005615,00.html
and several other newspapers all these documents are copyrighted, and
Vatical officials are currently trying impose strict copyright.
We have quite a lot of this stuff in Wikisources. See for example:
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_Encyclicals
and
http://pl.wikisource.org/wiki/Kategoria:Religia
What should we do with this? Send a formal letter to the Vatican,
asking for GFDL or PD licence agreement - or we should simply delete
all these documents?
--
Tomek "Polimerek" Ganicz
http://www.ceti.pl/kganicz/poli/kontakt.html
As an independent soverign nation, the Vatican is free to do many
things in regard to copyright law that would normally not be
acceptable in most other countries, including retroactive copyright
and other weird issues as well. The problem here is to see what sort
of copyright enforcement would generally be enforced through
international treaties (is the Vatican a member of the international
copyright convention?) and general common sense on things like this.
Common sense would seem to indicate that the older encyclicals from
the 19th Century and earlier would be reasonable to keep on
Wikisource, although I could see the Vatican even trying to assert
copyright on that as well.
As far as sending a letter to the Vatican, I think it would be a very
good idea, but try to really do a good job of explaining the goals of
Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, and point out how we are
trying to make faithful reproductions of these documents and to try
and keep them in context as well. In addition, point out that by
having this documentation available on Wikisource that we are making
this content available to people in not just wealthy countries, but
some of the poorer countries of the world including to people who
don't necessarily even have internet access and through multiple
languages. There are many other points I'm sure you could come up
with to really hit the point home, and I would recommend that you get
some Roman Catholics, preferably some Catholic clergy who are also
active Wikimedians (there must be a few somewhere) to help draft the
letter. The purpose here is to try to use language styles that fits
within the heirarchical culture of the Church rather than catch
phrases common to Wikimedians.
It is likely that the Vatican is simply going to reply that they have
their own website, and internet users can download the content from
there instead if they really want to get network access to the
documents. It is worth a try to ask somebody from the Vatican however.