[Commons-l] Multi-Licensing on multiple projects

Thu Sep 14 14:59:44 UTC 2006

On 9/14/06, Delphine Ménard <notafishz at gmail.com> wrote:
> ...what do you mean by "country of origin of the piece of work"?
>
> I'm French, I take a picture in Germany of anAmerican work of art
> that's public domain in the US but not in Germany. Which law applies?
>
> /me is lost.

Which law applies depends where you are publishing the work. If you
were publishing it in Germany then you would have to deal with the
fact that it is not PD. If you were publishing it in the US then you
would not.

"Country of origin" generally means "the place where something is
being published and thus where it is likely to end up in court."
Thinking about things as "where would I be before a judge?" is a good
way of thinking about jurisdictional issues, even though with
international treaties that itself is not always foolproof.

My problem with the example page given is that it gave the appearance
that a given contributor could license their works differently in
different countries (i.e. use free licenses one place and non-free in
another). That's clearly against the intent of Commons. I think,
though, that an approach which said, "This work is licensed as
CC-BY-SA" and then have a way to indicate that either "this only
applies in countries X, Y, and Z, because of such-and-such legal
condition" or "this does not apply in country X, because of
such-and-such legal condition." An example of this are photos of
copyrighted architecture, which in the USA (and I think Germany) are
explicitly said not to be copyright infringement, but in France and
some other countries are considered derivative works. So a photo of
the Eiffel tower at night could say, "GFDL in the USA and Germany; in
France elements of this could be considered copyright so-and-so."

I'm not sure a large and free-form table is the best way to accomplish
this. I think it will confuse people. I think perhaps though that if
we agree on certain issues (say, the architecture one), we could make
specific templates relating just to those instances. They should be
relatively limited in scope.

(The "free in the USA" requirement is necessary in any case, since the
Wikimedia servers "publish" the content from the USA. Whether it is
sufficient is a different question all together.)

FF