Dear Yann Forget,
Thank you for your mail.
Yann Forget <yann(a)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
--
Wikipedia -
http://en.wikipedia.org
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