[WikiEN-l] Copyright situation

[Roozbeh Pournader]

On 8/18/05, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> First, if we are breaking Iranian censorship laws, then so be it.  (I
> have no idea, actually, but I would imagine that we are.)   Merely
> "breaking Iranian law" isn't particularly worrisome.

Well, to get to the details about Iranian censorship of the Internet,
the is no law there, but semi-official regulations. And those
regulations, when referring to content from hosts outside Iran, only
have some implications for the Internet service providers inside Iran
who provide that information to end users.

Fortunately, Wikipedia is still far from raising anything 

> Second, I think the point is that such use would be legal in the US, and
> if so, I don't see that Iranians would have much of a way to sue us,
> except perhaps in Iran, which would be more or less pointless.

The copyright holders can republish the same material outside Iran and
have copyright protection, I believe. But Wikipedia may then say that
they have used the unprotected source...

A question: If I put some material on a website and publish it to the
world (including US) by doing that, do I get copyright protection?
Will it matter that I reside in Iran or not? Will it matter if the
hosting machine is in Iran or not?

In other words, assuming we actually want to use something protected
in Iran and not protected in the United States, what is the criteria
for making sure?

> I think the most compelling argument is that we want to encourage broad
> re-use, including in Iran, and if Iranian copyright laws are more or
> less as sensible as the laws of other places, then we should follow
> those laws, regardless of ongoing disputes between the US and Iran which
> may prevent an actual treaty.

I really appreciate that.

roozbeh