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).

On 11/3/06, 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?

Thanks for your help,

Best regards,

Yann Forget

[1] http://wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource_talk:Copyright_policy [2] http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Author:George_Bernard_Shaw

[3]http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:Pages_soup%C3%A7onn%C3%A9es_de_copy...

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Hi

On 11/3/06, Yann Forget yann@forget-me.net wrote:

Hi,

Luiz Augusto 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).

To be public domain elsewhere, but not in USA, it should be a work from a non US author published first in USA after 1922 and the author should be dead for more than 70 years. I don't know if such a case exists, but I doubt it.

So practically if only US law is used, it will be beneficial to all.

If this don't affect some recently public domain writers, like [[Fernando Pessoa]], is all ok to me :)

Best regards,

Yann

http://www.non-violence.org/ | Site collaboratif sur la non-violence http://www.forget-me.net/ | Alternatives sur le Net http://fr.wikipedia.org/ | Encyclopédie libre http://fr.wikisource.org/ | Bibliothèque libre http://wikilivres.info | Documents libres _______________________________________________ Wikisource-l mailing list Wikisource-l@mail.wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikisource-l

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')

Erik Moeller wrote:

On 11/3/06, 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.

There's an ongoing discussion on the Foundation-level about whether or not we should provide such advice to communities. In the meantime, it would probably be good for people in the community with legal expertise to self-organize as an open advisory group (juriwiki-l seemed to be going in that direction, I'm not sure how active it still is).

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

--- Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:

In

the meantime, it would probably be good for people in the community with legal expertise to self-organize as an open advisory group (juriwiki-l seemed to be going in that direction, I'm not sure how active it still is). -- Peace & Love, Erik

Member, Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees

DISCLAIMER: Unless otherwise stated, all views or opinions expressed in this message are solely my own and do not represent an official position of the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees. _______________________________________________ Wikisource-l mailing list Wikisource-l@mail.wikimedia.org

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If there are such people solely in the community (i.e. not Foundation legal advisors), I do not know any of them. If you mean people who do act as Foudation legal advisors simply putting on the "community member hat", I have not heard of them responding to requests recently. No one who is active at Wikisource has legal expertise of any sort as far as I am aware, so there is nothing we could self-organize. I am honestly not interested in broad policy advice, however there is a definate need for help on specific legal interpretations.

Birgitte SB

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On 05/11/06, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:

All content is hosted in and ultimately served from the United States.

</not a lawyer and cannot speak to legal issues>

OK, my previous statement was possibly incorrect, then. But out of interest, was there a formal decision to only have content-hosting machines in the US? Or is it only a fact of convenience (since I think that's where all the main devs are located)? Could content-hosting machines one day be hosted in Europe? (seems the most likely next location)

Brianna