[Foundation-l] NYT: Who owns the law? (Noam Cohen)

[Andrew Gray]

2008/9/30 Michael Bimmler <mbimmler at gmail.com>:
>
> Add Switzerland to these two...(are there really no others?). In
> Switzerland "laws, decrees, international treaties, means of currency,
> decisions, protocols and reports by public authorities, patents and
> published patent applications" are all explicitly exempt from
> copyright.

I can't speak firmly for anywhere specific, but I have certainly seen
this sort of text before in national copyright laws, plenty of times.

Specialised exemptions for legislation and vaguely legislative-like
things - legal rulings, formal public reports, patents, etc - seem to
be reasonably common, though full-scale governmental abandonment of
copyright (as in the US) is rare.

(On a vaguely relevant note, I've seen quite a few image copyright
tags which take these sort of provisions and their wording about
"..reports by public authorities...", etc, to assume PD-US like
status. Keep an eye out for them...)

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk