[Foundation-l] Copyright of Vatican stuff

[Ray Saintonge]

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?
>
The best thing is not to panic or send hurried letters until you have a 
better idea of what's going on.  Sending letters before that will only 
create more confusion.  The Vatican has been a party to the Berne 
Convention since 1935, so it does have a right to copyright protection.  
They also refer to 50 years, so they do not appear to be using the 70 
year extension adopted by the EU.  No mention is made of Pius XII.  The 
range of things that they appear to be covering suggests that they may 
be treating the encyclicals as works for hire, (servus servorum dei).

It's encouraging that the Vatican is asking for a levy of 3 to 5 percent 
of the cover price to reproduce material, and that this would increase 
to 15% in the case of infringement.  I think we should be able to afford 
that. :-)

I think that they are most pissed-off with the Milan publisher that 
scooped the forthcoming encyclical.  Let's see what the Italians do with 
this before we take very much action.

Ec