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

[Nathan]

On Wed, Feb 22, 2012 at 3:29 PM, Marcin Cieslak <saper at saper.info> wrote:

> > 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
>
>
You raise a more general issue that has always been a problem for some
reusers. In various disclaimers, the projects make it clear that downstream
reuse is at the risk of the reuser, and that compliance with legal
requirements (U.S. or otherwise) isn't guaranteed. We mitigate this risk by
having a more-strict-than-the-law-requires approach to the fair use
doctrine (which is not universal outside the U.S.), and we also advise
editors that actions they take which are legal in the U.S. may not be legal
in their home jurisdiction.

What sets this apart is that we are actively taking advantage of political
disarray in some nations to withhold rights that creators would otherwise
almost universally enjoy. While U.S. law allows us to do that, it doesn't
require us to, and I believe we should choose not to.