Hi all, As most of you know, the Indian copyright law says that a book gets relieved of copyright after 60 years from the author's death. But this is not the case with US Law. As given herehttps://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9b/Copyrightterm.pdf, of all the works published outside US, only those published before 1923 are directly in the public domain. The ones published between 1923 and 1977 without compliance to the US formalities will be in the public domain only if they are in the public domain in their source country as of 1 January 1996. Almost all the other categories of published works will not be in the public domain until 95 years after publishing.
This induces a confusion and when looked in a legal perspective, most of the books in Indian Wikisources, are still not in public domain and hence must be removed. This makes a huge negative impact on the hard work done by contributors. Their contributions are wasted which may cause them to stop contributing. In short, this may be a negative impact on Wikimedia's image in the society.
The only solution to this problem is to *host the servers of Indian Wikimedia services in India*, so that the data we upload is stored under Indian Laws. Can Wikimedia India Chapter do anything on this? We can plan and conduct a fundraiser in India to raise money for the hosting expenses.
Please consider this issue with maximum priority as it involves legal procedures and related headaches.
Regards, Balasankar C https://ml.wikisource.org/wiki/User:Balasankarc Regards, Balasankar C