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

[Robert Rohde]

I have updated

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:PD-Afghanistan

in an attempt to be compliant with US law and started a discussion
about this at:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump#PD-Afghanistan


The prior template, and the way it appeared to be used in some cases,
seemed to suggest that any image taken inside Afghanistan was PD.
This is of course not the case.  Hopefully my updates at least address
the minimum legal issues.

I'm not at all convinced that having PD-Afghanistan (or any comparable
PD templates on other projects) is a good thing, but at the very least
such templates need to be consistent with Berne / US laws regarding
the treatment of content from non-treaty states.  In my opinion, the
larger ethical issues still deserve further consideration though.

-Robert Rohde

On Thu, Feb 23, 2012 at 10:29 AM, Michael Snow <wikipedia at frontier.com> wrote:
> 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
>
>
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