[Foundation-l] Bridgeman v. Corel worldwide for Wikimedia Commons - yes or no?

[Yann Forget]

Hello,

Klaus Graf wrote:
> There are opinions on Commons that Moeller's statement in this list
> ("[W]e've consistently held that faithful reproductions of
> two-dimensional public domain works which are nothing more than
> reproductions should be considered public domain for licensing
> purposes") has been "overruled" by Mike Godwin's statement (which was
> adressed on a Wikisource case)
> 
> See
> http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons_talk:Licensing#About_Bridgeman_vs._Corel
> 
> We should not accept such nonsense.
> 
> Klaus Graf

Actually, this whole discussion resumes to a very short question: Which 
law do we apply on Wikimedia projects? No problem to apply US law 
because WMF is based in USA, but the "source country" has no definitive 
meaning, so we get into absurb situations:

1. What is the "source country" for an image scanned in France from a 
book bought in India by a British publisher (real case scenario)? 
Ultimately, we publish things in USA when we upload images and texts on 
Wikimedia servers.

Then we have the opposite situation:

1. What about a French book published in France in 1935 from an author 
who died in 1936? If we consider that US law doesn't apply the rule of 
shorter term, this book is not in the public domain in USA, although it 
is in the public domain in France, and was never published in USA.

Why not to apply just common sense?

Yann
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