[Commons-l] proposed policy - Commons:Trademarks

Sat Sep 9 10:06:30 UTC 2006

Quoting Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com>:

> On 9/8/06, Henning Schlottmann <h.schlottmann at gmx.net> wrote:
> > I suggested elsewhere the following idea of a golden rule for commons:
> > If an image is free in the US (physical place of the servers) and the
> > coutry of origin, it should be accepted.  We should not care for the
> > laws in saudi arabia or japan if the image is in no connection to those
> > countries.
> 
> This is overly simplistic. Wikimedia's output is intended to be free
> everywhere...  I don't think we should follow unusual and foolish laws
> in places where we are not required to do so, but that is a long way
> from only considering the law in the US and the uploaders location.
> 
I didn't understand "country of origin" to mean the uploaders location, which
may not be verifiable.

> An example is Iran. Iran is not *currently* a party to most
> international copyright treaties. As a result their copyrights are not
> considered valid in most of the world. However their copyright law is
> effectively equal to what is mandated by the Berne convention.
> 
> Today a US user could legally upload modern works published only in
> Iran, and they would be legal in most of the world.... but they would
> be illegal in Iran. If we fill the Persian language Wikipedia with
> these images, would we be succeeding at producing a free content
> encyclopedia in that language?    What happens next week if Iran signs
> the Berne Convention?
>
But for the purposes of this rule the country of origin of those works would be
Iran, where they were first published, not the US.

It seems that some rule of thumb is needed to overcome the complications of
every single theoretical, or even practical, forum shopping possibility for
copyright holders.  

Will

<snip>

----------------------------------------------------------------
This message was sent using IMP, the Internet Messaging Program.