[Foundation-l] English Wikipedia considering declaring open-season on works from countries lacking US copyright relations

Marcin Cieslak saper at saper.info
Wed Feb 22 20:29:35 UTC 2012


> The proposed change would mean all works where the "country of origin"
> (as legally defined by US statutes) is a non-treaty state would be
> declared as public domain for the purpose of Wikipedia and allowed to
> be freely used.  The current discussion features a 9-3 "consensus" in
> favor of this outcome [2], and some participants are now pushing for
> implementation on this basis [3].

If U.S. law (or rather lack thereof) is to prevail because the projects
are hosted in the U.S. I have two questions:

1) How would re-use of Wikipedia content look like to users
in the respective countries? Wouldn't they be limited in 
re-using some content if it was obtained from sources under
some kind of protection in their countries, but considered
public domain in the U.S.?

2) What about projects like Farsi Wikipedia, where we can
assume significant amount of editors comes from Iran 
- are they legally able to license that content to
the rest of the world?

//Marcin




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