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

[John Vandenberg]

On Wed, Oct 1, 2008 at 7:14 AM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
<cimonavaro at gmail.com> wrote:
> geni wrote:
>> 2008/9/30 John Vandenberg <jayvdb at gmail.com>:
>>
>>> 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.
>>>
>>
>> Okey. As I've said I'm more familiar with British based law than
>> French based (is Azerbaijan Russian based?). The problem is that
>> British does not have PD laws and has never done so which means that
>> anyone with an English law based legal system who hasn't updated the
>> relevant sections will not have PD laws. Rather a lot of countries
>> have English law based legal systems.
>>
>>
> Not okay. This is just absurd. It is ludicrous to assume that every
> country which is based on English law, will have jumped over the cliff
> after it, and balked from safeguarding itself from copyright silliness.

It was in 1911 that commonwealth countries were given the option of
defining their own copyright laws.  As far as I know, all have
radically revised their law, but many still have the 1911 law in
effect for works before the new laws were enacted.  Wikisource also
has a project to produce a text of the 1911 copyright act.  We need
help proofreading this vital law.

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Index:The_copyright_act,_1911,_annotated.djvu

The UK gov only provides a revised edition, which doesnt help us
understand what copyright law is in effect in commonwealth countries
which enacted their own laws at different years, and thus based on
different editions of the UK law.  Here is the revised law:

http://www.opsi.gov.uk/RevisedStatutes/Acts/ukpga/1911/cukpga_19110046_en_1

The UK gov only provide originals for a small subset of laws prior to 1998.

http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts.htm
--
John V