[Wikimedia-l] "Legalised Piracy"

[Yaroslav M. Blanter]

>
>> I'm not sure what this means for the movement - I'm sure there will 
>> be a
>> long and lively discussion - but it's a very interesting turn of 
>> events in
>> IP law.
>
> Well, on the one hand wikimedia host works in US, on the other hand,
> how many works/articles hosted by wikimedia whom all authors are US
> citizens can you find? As I understand it, they can't ignore
> international copyrights.
>

Well, we have this problem that all files we use on Commons have to be 
free in both the country of origin (typically 70 years since the death 
of the author) and in the US (typically 95 years since creation if after 
1923). This means that many of the things created in the 1920s and the 
1930s which would be free or soon-to-be-free in the country of origin 
are  still unfree in the US. In this sense, lifting the limitation that 
the file should still be free in the US would help. But I guess we are 
not going to relocate the servers to Antigua anyway.

Cheers
Yaroslav