[Foundation-l] NYT: Who owns the law? (Noam Cohen)

[John Vandenberg]

On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 8:27 PM, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2008/9/30 David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com>:
>> Hmm. Is there any practical help the WMF could provide in this
>> endeavour? Aside from buckets of money, which appears to be the thing
>> the endeavour is most in need of.

We have projects to cater for this: Commons and Wikisource projects.
Both accept legal documents in scans and text respectively.  On
Wikisource we have the Proofread Page extension, so that we can
transcribe the text of documents.  Here are a few relevant
transcription projects:

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Index:H.R._Rep._No._94-1476
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Index:United_States_Reports,_Volume_209.djvu
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Index:The_Records_of_the_Federal_Convention_of_1787_Volume_2.djvu
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Index:California_State_Constitution_of_1879.djvu
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Index:Carter_Presidential_Directive_59,_Nuclear_Weapons_Employment_Policy.djvu
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Index:Brundtland_Report

Where we dont have images, all Wikisource projects except the German
project accept text without images, such as Azeri copyright law:

http://az.wikisource.org/wiki/M%C3%BC%C9%99lliflik_h%C3%BCququ_v%C9%99_%C9%99laq%C9%99li_h%C3%BCquqlar_haqq%C4%B1nda

Wikisource also accepts translations, so the laws can be translated
into other languages so that everyone can readily understand the laws
of other nations.  It would be fantastic if we had free English
translations of the relevant copyright laws of all nations -- Commons
would find that they can figure out the copyright status a lot easier
if they had the actual texts at their disposal.

>> Are there other countries where the law is not easily available and a
>> word from us would help?

This is true for most countries.  Even the U.S.  There are a number of
transcription projects on Wikisource for U.S. court decisions, Public
Laws, older editions of Constitutions, etc. where the text is not
otherwise available online _at all_.

> From what I recall the law is protected by copyright everywhere other
> than the US and North Korea (North Korea is kinda unclear it depends
> on what exactly is meant by government pronouncements).

Absurd.  Most recently written copyright laws are very clear that laws
and judicial opinions are in the public domain.  add Israel and
Azerbaijan to the growing list appearing in this thread.

Wikisource accepts the law of _all_ countries, as it is hosted in the
U.S., and the copyright office has explicitly said that anyone wanting
to register a legal document for copyright purposes will need to take
them to the supreme court in order to obtain a copyright.  See

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Template:PD-GovEdict

UK, Canada and Australia are the only three I can quickly think of
where crown copyright is asserted over public laws, however the crown
provides simple to fulfil reuse requirements that are essentially in
place to prevent misuse.  On Wikisource we have recently restored the
recent laws of these nations on the assumption that U.S. law prevails
while the servers are located in the U.S.

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:Proposed_deletions/Archives/2008-05#Crown_Copyright_waiver

It would be great to have more legal opinions given on this matter;
esp. from the WMF.

--
John Vandenberg