[Foundation-l] [Commons-l] Wikimedia Foundation's help to the projects

[David Monniaux]

Yann Forget wrote:

>For my practical use, is a photograph taken in India in 1908 by a Indian
>photographer is public domain in USA (first published in India)? and if
>it is taken in 1920? in 1945? and if the photographer is American (first
>published in USA)? and if the photographer is from a third country,
>England, for example? (Indian copyright law is "public domain 60 years
>after publication" for photographs and sound recordings).
>
Two major problems here:
* In many cases, copyright questions may be resolved only on a
case-by-case basis. For instance, in many countries, copyright only
protects "works of the mind" with no exhaustive and clear definition of
what a work of the mind is, and it is possible that certain technical
photographs are not works of the mind that can be protected by
copyright. However, deciding whether this is the case for a particular
photograph will entail examining details related to the photographic
process, and thus no clear-cut global answer can be provided.

* In many cases, what we intend to do simply has not been tested in
court. People often mistakenly believe that there are things that are
"legal" vs things that are "prohibited" and thus that lawyers can tell
us which is which. In reality, there are things clearly legal, those
clearly illegal, and things in between for which a lawyer may only give
some kind of educated guess of whether that would fly in court (which in
turn depends on how well we argue our case in court).

Both of this clash with the expectations of many of our users and
admins, that is, to get black and white "yes / no" answers to legal queries.