2008/5/15 Daniel Kinzler daniel@brightbyte.de:
cases, but not all. Consider this case: someone finds an image on commons which is labeled PD, and decides to use it as a book cover. After the book has been published, it turns out that it's not PD at all, and the copyright holder sues the book's author/publisher for 100k$ and wins. The books publisher then turns on us (the foundation, the uploader, the reviewing admins) for compensation. Do we have legal safeguards against that case? I don't think we do. But it's a question for the lawyers, I guess.
Publishers are already this paranoid :-) I've seen quite a few exchanges with OTRS which boil down to:
"Can I have permission to use X image?" "You don't need permission, it's public domain" "Please show us the paperwork..." [or] "We'd still like your agreement"
Anyway, we had the "draw the line somewhere" discussion repeatedly before, in all length and width, with, as far as I know, no definite outcome, besides maybe that 200 years are probably enough.
Definitely enough. The worst-case scenario I can imagine is the juvenile work of a very long-lived author in a country with life+70.
Work created at 15; author survives to 100; that's date of creation plus 85. Then another seventy years, total of plus 155.
I think we can safely say that anything over 120 is broadly likely to be public domain; anything over 150 is almost certainly public domain; by 170 it's virtually a cast-iron guarantee. Big caveat, as usual, with French works and those weird wartime extensions.
However! This is vastly, vastly, *vastly* complicated by the unpublished works rule, which gives a varying degree of protection based on *date of publication* not of author's copyright, and so we need to show it was published quite a while back...