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

[Michael Snow]

On 2/23/2012 9:37 AM, Robert Rohde wrote:
> Under US copyright law (and more generally the Berne Convention),
> establishing that a work is in the public domain due to a lack of
> treaty status requires meeting several requirements, and those
> templates only address the most obvious one.  These requirements are:
>
> 1) The work was first published in a country that has no copyright
> relations with the US.
> 2) None of the authors of the work are citizens of any country that
> does have copyright relations with the US.
> 3) Within thirty days of publication in the non-treaty state, the work
> was never also published in any other state that does have copyright
> relations with the US.
Regarding the second point, the coverage is actually even broader than 
citizenship, it includes residency. So if one of the authors is an 
Iranian exile living in Turkey, the work may be subject to copyright 
protection in the US even if it was published only in Iran.

I think it's interesting to note that although the approach under 
discussion may seem like a mechanical application of law and entirely 
neutral on its face, the scenario I've indicated suggests that its 
structural effects could be far from neutral, with significant political 
consequences. Basically, it means that when a country that does not 
participate in international copyright agreements, to the extent that it 
may be a repressive and often censorious regime whose opponents are 
commonly forced into expatriate life, we could be indiscriminately 
republishing works acceptable to the regime while taking a much more 
restrictive approach to works from a dissident perspective.

--Michael Snow