[Foundation-l] Copyright terms, again

[Nathan]

On Wed, Nov 10, 2010 at 12:33 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> The servers are in the US and owned by a US organisation which has
> minimal overseas assets, which means US law is pretty much the only
> one that applies. If you want people in Serbia to be able to re-use
> the content, though, you need to make sure it satisfies Serbian law
> too. That means you need to make sure it satisfies whichever is the
> more restrictive in any given situation.
>
> I agree that US copyright law is a mess, but we have no choice about
> following it. If someone wanted to sue the WMF over copyright
> infringement, they would do it in the US, since the US clearly has
> jurisdiction and the WMF has lots of seizable assets there. Other
> countries may also have jurisdiction, but there isn't much point suing
> someone in a court that can't get hold of any of their assets.
>

I'm not sure this is a direct answer to his question, and it also
confuses the issue of jurisdiction and liability; while the WMF may be
"judgment proof" in Serbia, users in Serbia are not. Depending on
Serbian law, users could be liable in both Serbia and the United
States for infringement.

I don't spend much time on Commons, but I think the Commons answer to
this question is to apply the most restrictive set of copyright laws -
in this case, between Serbian and U.S. law. If something is PD in
Serbia but not in the U.S., then it is not considered PD for our
purposes.

~Nathan