[Foundation-l] Copyright of Vatican stuff

[Robert Scott Horning]

Tomasz Ganicz wrote:

>Hello,
>
>There is a problem of potential copyright violation of putting to the
>Wikisources and other Wikimedia projects encyclis and other documents
>signed by Pope. According to:
>
>http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,13509-2005615,00.html
>
>and several other newspapers all these documents are copyrighted, and
>Vatical officials are currently trying impose strict copyright.
>
>We have quite a lot of this stuff in Wikisources. See for example:
>
>http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_Encyclicals
>
>and
>
>http://pl.wikisource.org/wiki/Kategoria:Religia
>
>What should we do with this? Send a formal letter to the Vatican,
>asking for GFDL or PD licence agreement - or we should simply delete
>all these documents?
>
>--
>Tomek "Polimerek" Ganicz
>http://www.ceti.pl/kganicz/poli/kontakt.html
>  
>
As an independent soverign nation, the Vatican is free to do many things 
in regard to copyright law that would normally not be acceptable in most 
other countries, including retroactive copyright and other weird issues 
as well.  The problem here is to see what sort of copyright enforcement 
would generally be enforced through international treaties (is the 
Vatican a member of the international copyright convention?) and general 
common sense on things like this.  Common sense would seem to indicate 
that the older encyclicals from the 19th Century and earlier would be 
reasonable to keep on Wikisource, although I could see the Vatican even 
trying to assert copyright on that as well.

As far as sending a letter to the Vatican, I think it would be a very 
good idea, but try to really do a good job of explaining the goals of 
Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, and point out how we are trying 
to make faithful reproductions of these documents and to try and keep 
them in context as well.  In addition, point out that by having this 
documentation available on Wikisource that we are making this content 
available to people in not just wealthy countries, but some of the 
poorer countries of the world including to people who don't necessarily 
even have internet access and through multiple languages.  There are 
many other points I'm sure you could come up with to really hit the 
point home, and I would recommend that you get some Roman Catholics, 
preferably some Catholic clergy who are also active Wikimedians (there 
must be a few somewhere) to help draft the letter.  The purpose here is 
to try to use language styles that fits within the heirarchical culture 
of the Church rather than catch phrases common to Wikimedians.

It is likely that the Vatican is simply going to reply that they have 
their own website, and internet users can download the content from 
there instead if they really want to get network access to the 
documents.  It is worth a try to ask somebody from the Vatican however.

-- 
Robert Scott Horning