[Foundation-l] Does "free content" exist in France?

[David Gerard]

On 21/04/07, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:

> What is somewhat unclear to me is to what extent other countries'
> moral-rights legislation is enforceable outside their countries.  Can it
> be safely ignored by those in countries that lack such laws, much like
> Turkey's laws against "insulting Turkishness" are ignored outside
> Turkey, or is it worldwide in legal applicability?  If the former it
> presents less of a unique problem for free content---it's already the
> case that free content's reuse is restricted in some ways in some
> countries due to particular legislation, and we can't do a whole lot
> about that.


The question is whether the author releasing a work under a free
content licence would constitute permission to remix under French
moral rights legislation. I suspect this would require case law. And
if the answer turned out to be "no," then no French citizen could
legally create a free content work, and Wikimedia would not be able to
have contributors from France. WMF may care to work very hard against
this eventuating.


- d.