[Foundation-l] EDP: US servers loophole?

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 4/3/07, Nyenyec N <nyenyec at gmail.com> wrote:
[snip]
> Let's take album covers as an example. Hungary, just like Germany
> doesn't have a broad equivalent of "fair use". According to Hungarian
> law, album covers cannot be distributed without permission.

I think we need a FAQ point that says:

Q: "But my country doesn't have anything like fair use / fair dealing"
A: "You're probably incorrect."

See the current Hungarian copyright act, (Act LXXVI of 1999, I have no
clue how to cite Hungarian law).

I'm fairly confidence that you have some degree of fair use, ...
although it may not be as permissive as US law, the Wikimedia policy
is focused on the part of fair use which should be most widely
available (the part required to prevent copyright from being used to
effectively stop free speech).

As several of our Wikipedias have shown, it's possible to have a very
good large Wikipedia without any EDP images at all. I see the huwiki
only has around 50K articles
(http://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speci%C3%A1lis:Statistics?uselang=en)
... I think it would be reasonable to ask your community if the lack
of ability to use non-free images will harm your project at this
stage.  I don't think there are any clear answers, it's just something
interesting to consider.

[snip]
> But one could say, that Hungarian copyright law doesn't make it
> illegal to upload these images to servers located in the United
> States. By doing so you're not breaking any laws.

I'm reasonably confident that you will not find a single jurisdiction
with effective copyright law where the act of uploading to someone
elses website isn't considered a reserved right under copyright law
(in most places it will likely be consider just another form of
copying, although some laws may special case it in order to have extra
harshness for infringements created online).