Dear Yann Forget,

Thank you for your mail.

Yann Forget yann@forget-me.net wrote:

Hi,

On behalf of the Wikisource contributors, I request an official advice from the Wikimedia Foundation regarding copyright issues on Wikisource.

The issue is whether works which are public domain in USA, but not in their country of origin can be published on Wikisource. Public domain in USA is the rule which is applied since the beginning of the project in November 2004. I ask in December 2004 [1] that a clear policy should be defined, but it was never done. Subdomains have followed different rules on this matter: for example, the English Wikisource publishes works from George Bernard Shaw [2], an Irish author, works which are public domain in USA but not in Ireland. A similar issue now arises on the French Wikisource [3] about works from Gaston Leroux.

So can we follow a uniform policy accross languages and subdomains and publish any work which is public domain in USA, or should another policy be defined?

This is not an official reply from the Foundation, but I've followed copyright discussions for a while. Since the Wikipedia webservers are located in the United States, US law is the minimum standard that all projects need to follow: if something is legally unusable under US law, it should not be used on any project or language. Individual projects and languages are free to apply additional restrictions if they wish.

Yours sincerely, William Fairfax