[Foundation-l] Fwd: [Commons-l] Time to Seek Professional Lawyers Advice?

[Matt Brown]

On 9/4/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> Just what *is* the status of {{PD-Soviet}}? Is it bogus or not? Having
> a bunch of wiki users vote on legal status doesn't strike me as
> legally sound ...

IMO, as an educated layman, {{PD-Soviet}} is bogus.  The arguments are
contradictory, half of them seem to boil down to 'nobody is going to
sue us over these anyway', and the interactions between
poorly-understood Soviet-era law, modern Russian etc. law, and
international treaties seem to indicate that while in Russia certain
works MAY be out of copyright protection, there is no sane reason to
believe this means a damn thing anywhere else in the world.  The works
that may be out of copyright protection in Russia seem, in fact, to be
FOREIGN works from the period, not Soviet works, and even then it's
quite probable that this does not apply to new copies made in the
present day.

IOW, if you're Russian, this may be of interest in terms of what you
can do inside Russia.  For the rest of us, IMO, standard
Berne-convention copyright law applies.  This applies to any other
version of the argument; Poland, Iran, or wherever.  In the Iran case,
people argue since Iran is not a Berne signatory, we can treat any
Iranian works as PD.  I don't think this is a sound policy morally
even if a lawyer could win with the argument.

-Matt