On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 8:27 PM, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
2008/9/30 David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com:
Hmm. Is there any practical help the WMF could provide in this endeavour? Aside from buckets of money, which appears to be the thing the endeavour is most in need of.
We have projects to cater for this: Commons and Wikisource projects. Both accept legal documents in scans and text respectively. On Wikisource we have the Proofread Page extension, so that we can transcribe the text of documents. Here are a few relevant transcription projects:
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Index:H.R._Rep._No._94-1476 http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Index:United_States_Reports,_Volume_209.djvu http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Index:The_Records_of_the_Federal_Convention_of... http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Index:California_State_Constitution_of_1879.dj... http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Index:Carter_Presidential_Directive_59,_Nuclea... http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Index:Brundtland_Report
Where we dont have images, all Wikisource projects except the German project accept text without images, such as Azeri copyright law:
http://az.wikisource.org/wiki/M%C3%BC%C9%99lliflik_h%C3%BCququ_v%C9%99_%C9%9...
Wikisource also accepts translations, so the laws can be translated into other languages so that everyone can readily understand the laws of other nations. It would be fantastic if we had free English translations of the relevant copyright laws of all nations -- Commons would find that they can figure out the copyright status a lot easier if they had the actual texts at their disposal.
Are there other countries where the law is not easily available and a word from us would help?
This is true for most countries. Even the U.S. There are a number of transcription projects on Wikisource for U.S. court decisions, Public Laws, older editions of Constitutions, etc. where the text is not otherwise available online _at all_.
From what I recall the law is protected by copyright everywhere other than the US and North Korea (North Korea is kinda unclear it depends on what exactly is meant by government pronouncements).
Absurd. Most recently written copyright laws are very clear that laws and judicial opinions are in the public domain. add Israel and Azerbaijan to the growing list appearing in this thread.
Wikisource accepts the law of _all_ countries, as it is hosted in the U.S., and the copyright office has explicitly said that anyone wanting to register a legal document for copyright purposes will need to take them to the supreme court in order to obtain a copyright. See
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Template:PD-GovEdict
UK, Canada and Australia are the only three I can quickly think of where crown copyright is asserted over public laws, however the crown provides simple to fulfil reuse requirements that are essentially in place to prevent misuse. On Wikisource we have recently restored the recent laws of these nations on the assumption that U.S. law prevails while the servers are located in the U.S.
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:Proposed_deletions/Archives/2008-05...
It would be great to have more legal opinions given on this matter; esp. from the WMF.
-- John Vandenberg