[WikiEN-l] Copyright situation

[Fastfission]

This leads to a legal question I've had for some time and comes up
again and again regarding jurisidiction.

Somebody has recently pointed out on another page that in Russia,
banal (straightforward) photographs of 3-D objects do not apparently
generate copyrights (whether this is true or not, I'm not sure, but
let's just assume it is for the moment). In the US, such is not the
case -- any 2-D image of a 3-D object is likely to generate its own
copyright, however banal.

So can we say that images of this sort that never leave Russia -- that
is, are not republished anywhere else -- are in the public domain? I'm
leaning towards "well, probably no," mainly because it would only seem
to matter if we were being hosted on Russian servers and under Russian
copyright laws. That is, if somebody sued someone over this in court
here, they couldn't point to a Russian copyright law either way on
this. On the other hand, would they even be granted standing?

How much do international treaties affect us on this? WIPO, etc.?
Obviously we have US laws to deal with, but who else? I know that one
issue is re-use, but I think there's a more direct issue than that
which I still find confusing.

FF

On 8/18/05, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic at gmail.com> wrote:
> Regardless of where a certain text comes from. It's copyrighted as
> soon as the author puts it on paper in a tangible form. Some
> governments give up their copyrights over this material, but I think
> anything that can be traced to a written source that's not
> specifically released under the GFDL or released into the PD by it's
> author is off limits to Wikipedia regardless where it comes from.
> 
> --Mgm
> 
> On 8/18/05, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> > Roozbeh Pournader wrote:
> > > There are problems with that:
> > > 1) I believe the Wikimedia Foundation would be breaking Iranian law by
> > > distributing those material to Iran, that is, serving its pages to
> > > Iranian readers. If it wishes to use the material, it should block
> > > Iran from its readership.
> > > 2) It's not only the government, and other Iranians may wish to sue
> > > the Wikimedia Foundation.
> >
> > Well, although I agree with you about the ultimate point here (we should
> > not violate Iranian copyrights, even if it is legal to do so in the US),
> > I don't find these two arguments to be the most compelling.
> >
> > 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.
> >
> > 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.
> >
> > 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.
> >
> > --Jimbo
> >
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