[Commons-l] Old works in public domain vs. US Copyright Law

[Luiz Augusto]

I'm on a similar problem at the Portuguese Wikisource due to the
[[:m:American non-acceptance of the rule of the shorter term]] (see on [1]).

I've proposed in a private e-mail to Anthere (not yet replied, I think that
she is busy in others subjects) to create a set of wikis <lang>.non-
us.wikisource.org hosted outside of the United States ({{derivative}} from
the Debian non-us software repository [2]) to host works PD-old worldwide
but copyrighted in the USA. Can a non-us Commons media repository help on
preventing to delete thousands of images?

foundation-l have a discussion started today based on the same problem: [3]

[1]
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:Scriptorium#PD-old_non-us..._I.27m_confused

[2] http://www.debian.org/mirror/list-non-US

[3] http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2007-April/029741.html

On 4/27/07, Petr Kadlec <petr.kadlec at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi!
>
> When "investigating" the copyright status of some old images, I
> realized that our {{PD-old}} template is quite a bit misleading.
>
> IIANM (note: IANAL), works published after 1923 by authors who died
> between 1926 and 1936 (i.e. dead more than 70 years) are _not_ public
> domain in US (and will not be until at least 2019 [1]), although they
> are PD in EU states (among others). And as the US law is quite
> relevant to the WMF servers, we must consider those works to be
> copyrighted.
>
> The copyright status of an old work is therefore determined not only
> by the death date of its author, but also by its publishing date and
> our templates (and procedures) should acknowledge that. (See also
> [[commons:Commons talk:Licensing/Which copyright law applies?]])
>
> Unfortunately, I cannot imagine we would be able to explain the
> difficult rules on the upload form so that anyone would understand
> them. The need for a wizard-style upload is evident once again…
>
> P. S. I must say I am afraid that this fact about US copyright law is
> ignored (not known) on more projects which consider works by authors
> who died before 1936 as PD regardless of the publishing date.
>
> -- [[cs:User:Mormegil | Petr Kadlec]]
>
> [1] See e.g. [[en:Wikipedia:Non-US copyrights]]
>
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>
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