On 11/3/06, Luiz Augusto lugusto@gmail.com wrote:
If a policy for all Wikisources is going to be based in the USA laws and ignore all international agreements, lots of works that are in public domain in anothers countries but not in the USA needs to be deleted. Lots of works from brazilians and portugueses writers that died more than 70 years... Is more simple to respect the copyright from the contry of origin (and make attempts to change the stupid 100 years after death law in the USA).
Local communities should not decide not to apply US copyright law. The Foundation is legally based in the United States, so US law applies. If it is copyrighted in the United States it is unacceptable, regardless of its status elsewhere.
Whether to include works that are copyrighted elsewhere is a less important point. Although doing so increases the possible repertoire, it also reduces the usefulness of that repertoire outside the United States. The English Wikisource attempts to balance this by carefully categorizing such works[1] so that they can be excluded at will.
Perfectly synchronizing the copyright policies may prove to be more effort than its worth, and alienate a lot of contributors. For example, the English Wikisource has a more or less restrictive copyright policy, which generally only allows clear-cut public domain or GFDL-compatible works. I would be very displeased if this policy were blurred in the synchronization. Likewise, I imagine many users on other subdomains would be very displeased to see many works deleted if their local policies were made more restrictive.
A possible solution is to have a global copyright policy that all Wikisource subdomains must respect, but leave the finer points to the individual projects. For example, consider the following simplistic statements.
Global policy: * must be clearly PD or GFDL-compatible in the US; * must not be fair use; * must allow commercial use and redistribution.
Some local policy: * must not be/may be copyrighted in the country of origin.
This kind of division would place every subdomain within US law, but allow the local communities to decide for themselves the finer details within that law.
[1] [http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Category:Public_domain_outside_the_United_Stat...] and [http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Category:Public_domain_in_the_United_States].
Kind regards, Jesse Martin (en-Wikisource administrator 'Pathoschild')