[Foundation-l] Copyright on Wikisource

[Erik Moeller]

Yann Forget:
> Hi,
> 
> And oh, I forgot to say that if the new rule is to apply French laws to French 
> language projects, then first do it on the French Wikipedia, which goes 
> against French laws in many ways, the first of all by allowing "fair use", 
> then it would be proper to do it on Wikisource.

I think we need to ask two key questions in every case:

1) What is the nationality of the uploader?
2) What is the nationality of the copyright holder of the work?

If the answer to either of these question is "French", then it seems to 
me that there is a risk for the uploader, the French Chapter, or the 
U.S. Foundation to be sued in a French court.

To me, this is independent of the language of the Wikimedia project in 
question; the French Wikipedia is not inherently tied to the nation of 
France, nor is the English Wikipedia tied to the United States.

Since the text(s) you would like to see reproduced were written by a 
French author, I would advise against hosting them on our servers for 
that reason. It's quite simple: Unless we explicitly deny access to this 
content from French users, we provide them with illegal copies of this 
material, and a French court is likely to find so. Denying access in 
this fashion would obviously be undesirable.

As for the "fair use" policy of the French Wikipedia, I believe that the 
policies in question should not be applicable to material created by 
French copyright holders, unless there is a similar applicable "fair 
use" exemption in French copyright law. In general, uploaders of French 
nationality should be made aware that they may be in violation of French 
law if they upload copyrighted material to an American server under the 
U.S. "fair use" doctrine.

I'm in favor of limited fair use on all projects, simply because there 
are materials (logos, cartoon characters etc.) of which we will never be 
able to obtain reproductions under free licenses. On the other hand, 
making all fair use images go through a review process is probably a 
good idea. We need to find a reasonable balance and strive for 
harmonization of said balance across the Wikimedia projects.

Erik