[WikiEN-l] Dead wikipedians and how to really make a project boring to death

[Matt Brown]

On 8/1/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> Assuming that he's still living in Afghanistan, I believe that that
> country has never had copyright relations with the United States.  That
> alone would make it public domain under US law. :-)

In other cases (e.g. Iran) we have not considered this legitimately
public domain for our purposes.  For one thing, if relations with the
state were normalised, the copyright status would instantly change;
secondly, I feel we should respect the intentions of copyright and not
use such a legal loophole.  We wouldn't be happy with Iranians and
Afghans not respecting our copyright or license, would we?

-Matt