Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:
Robert Graham Merkel wrote:
If I were Jimbo, I'd be tempted to deliberately perpetuate an American stereotype and tell the National Portrait Gallery to kiss our ass and sue if they dare...but I'd perhaps want to get a real legal opinion first.
It is tempting, of course, but there are some puzzling additional issues here.
One of our goals is to keep our content freely redistributable as widely as possible. One unsettled question is the degree to which we are willing to alter our content to meet legal conditions which we regard as unjust.
That, and to what extent do we want to monitor a wide range of laws in many countries. It's just not practical. Consideration of the host country's laws and major international treaties makes sense, but if a downstream user is going to republish material he must accept some responsibility for his actions.
Clearly, if we got an email from North Korea saying that any portrayal of their government in a negative light is illegal, and that anyone who redistributes our content there will get in legal trouble, we will just ignore it. Altering the political neutrality of our content is pretty much out of the question.
It's unsafe to mix issues; the results are too unpredictable. A more appropriate question in regards to North Korea might have to to with the copyrights to a portrait of Kim Il-sung, and whether we would respect the copyrights of an identified North Korean photographer.
But it is less clear to me how we should draw the line when the issue is relatively minor, and relatively content-neutral. (To explain what I mean by content neutral: if we did not have these particular images, this would not introduce a major political or other bias in our articles in the same way that a demanded change of text would.)
In other words the acceptability of the picture in terms of NPOV policy is a different issue from acceptability in terms of copyright policy.
When the issue is U.S. law, our hands are more tied than in other cases, but fortunately, in a wide range of cases it turns out that U.S. law is better than other jurisdictions, particularly given the fair use doctrine, the DMCA "safe harbor" provisions, etc. (But see my p.s. below.)
Agreed. But that still allows us room to manoeuvre if we feel we have a just cause. Not all take down requests are justified.
But I want people to be able to print books from Wikipedia content and then hand them out in the tube in London at rush hour if they like, so totally ignoring British law is not a viable option.
But Britain and the other developed countries are not where the distribution would be most useful. Some third world countries may have ridiculously complicated laws but no means of enforcing them. With the British laws under discussion, more than one interpretation is possible. How do we determine which of two conflicting interpretations is the right one?
I would be interested in gathering examples of content that (a) we ought to have in the encyclopedia on editorial grounds but that (b) would not be legal for us to host in the United States.
To my knowledge, virtually all examples of content that is not legal in the U.S., but which *is* legal elsewhere, are not really relevant to our encyclopedic mission. The age of consent for models in pornographic pictures in the U.S. is 18 in the U.S., but lower in some other countries, but we don't publish pornographic pictures so this is irrelevant to us.
I can speak better of this in a Wikisource context. The issue of the copyrights on Hitler's Mein Kampf has been discussed. A German language edition would be perfectly legal in the United States but not in most of Europe; the same could be said of any new translation. The existing major English language versions continue to be covered by copyrights in both places. In Canada all of these versions could be legally published.
The early works of Bertrand Russell (d. 1962 at age 98) would, at least in theory, still be covered by US copyright if they were never published in the US even if the foreign publication was before 1923.
Project Gutenberg does include some material that is covered by US copyrights, but has done so with an Australian server where the publication is perfectly legal. They merely advise US readers not to view these pages because they may be breaking the law by doing so.
The porn issue ends up being a diversion from the complexities of the copyright issue. It would be wise to avoid situations that bring them together.
Ec