Hi On 11/3/06, Yann Forget <yann(a)forget-me.net> wrote: If this don't affect some recently public domain writers, like [[Fernando Pessoa]], is all ok to me :) Best regards,

Erik Moeller wrote: I think that I agree with you on this. I have always strongly believed in the autonomy of the projects, but for that to be effective the projects need to avoid the temptation to seek high-level policy statements that could have effects beyond what is intended. I think that Yann's request is simplistic. International copyright law is extremely complex, and when it was being drafted it could never have forseen the issues that are now being raised because of what modern technology has made possible. Any kind of pronouncement would not do justice to all the possibilities. U.S. law must absolutely be the first that we look at in any given situation, just because the servers are there. We could probably get away with ignoring the laws of all other countries, but that could have other consequences. The Leroux matter has to do with a peculiar aspect of French law that extended the usual life + 70 for time lost during the war. There are also people around to claim the rights so this is not an orphan work. Whether that extension also became applicable is also applicable in the United States as a part of the US adhesion to the Berne Convention is a debatable point, but Project Gutenberg already includes the French version of two of the works in question. Furthermore the two English translations published in 1908 and 1909 would be in the public domain. This all comes down to a question of whether the French Wikisource wants to maintain good relations with the heirs of Gaston Leroux. George Bernard Shaw has nothing to do with this. The special French extension does not come into question in this. Shaw is still protected in England since he died in 1950, but he originally wrote in English over a very long period, and much of his work would already have been published in the United States in the original language before 1923. These are devilishly nuanced situations. Any policy position that says, "Follow US law, and ignore the rest" would be wrong on many levels even if it is legally correct on a technical level. Ec

Brianna Laugher wrote: We have caching proxies in South Korea and the Netherlands. (A few sites used to be actually hosted in Korea as an experiment, which we abandoned a few weeks ago to simplify our setup.) Wikimedia has no servers at all in Germany, though Wikimedia Deutschland is providing some additional servers to our data center in the Netherlands. As with the others these will be caching proxies and don't store, host or manage actual content themselves beyond proxying HTTP requests. All content is hosted in and ultimately served from the United States. </not a lawyer and cannot speak to legal issues> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

Brianna Laugher wrote: Physical location of software developers is highly irrelevant; I'm usually in the US but nobody else is. :) Our current main hosting center was I think chosen mainly because it was convenient to where Jimmy relocated himself and his company a few years ago, and Wikipedia went along for the ride. Choosing someplace outside the US wouldn't have made much sense for a US company... Hypothetically content-hosting machines could one day be located anywhere. In reality this depends on a number of factors, chiefly: * Practicality It's far, far, far, far, far, far easier and more reliable to keep things centralized, hence our abandonment of the limited experiment with a second content cluster. On this basis alone it's unlikely we'll add content-bearing servers in new locations in the forseeable future. (And if it does happen, they'll need more hands-on operations.) * Legal Operating in another jurisdiction may have legal ramifications, the details of which may or may not be acceptable. At the least, adding more jurisdictions will add to uncertainty. I can't speak for the foundation about what would be considered acceptable or likely conditions. Apparently the Korea experiment was considered acceptable on this basis, but I never really got a clear view from WMF on this issue. IANAL IANAL IANAL IANAL -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)