Hey,
From what I understand WikiSource’s servers are located in the US and must
therefore follow US Copyright.
I would like a much deeper understanding of how copyright is upheld online
since it’s so easy to access “foreign” websites, of course.
I would like to upload a book - Finnegans Wake by James Joyce - to
WikiSource. It’s out of copyright in Europe but on the US, because they
have different copyright lengths.
If we assume US copyright law applying to servers physically located in the
US, that much makes sense. But is there a law that people in the US cannot
access those same materials on foreign servers where they are not
copyrighted? If that’s actually a law, how do they enforce that? They would
need to stick up some kind of internet barrier, internet censorship. Is
that legal? How could they achieve it? Wouldn’t they basically have to get
internet service providers to block a certain domain or something? So… the
government would say, “We heard foreign site X is serving copyrighted
material to American citizens; block that site for all Americans”? And then
the foreign site would respond (to get unblocked) by checking the location
of whoever’s requesting their webpage and probably specifically limit
content depending on region, to comply with the government? (In which case
the user could use a VPN.)
What about where a company is registered?
Can Wikisource.de - if it’s actually hosted in Germany - host Finnegans
Wake even if Wikisource is perhaps trademarked in the US or something?
Does the law work that way, that a company registered in one country is
responsible for complying with copyright law internationally? (I assume so,
it sounds likely).
Anyway: if we cannot host Finnegans Wake on Wikisource.de, is there any
good workaround? Wikipedia is a very international phenomenon, it would be
too bad if it only were ruled by American law. Can’t we create a German
subsidiary legal entity for it or something?
Thanks very much,
Julius