[Foundation-l] Copyright of Vatican stuff

Wed Jan 25 14:28:39 UTC 2006

On 1/25/06, Robert Scott Horning <robert_horning at netzero.net> wrote:
> Tomasz Ganicz wrote:
>
> >Hello,
> >
> >There is a problem of potential copyright violation of putting to the
> >Wikisources and other Wikimedia projects encyclis and other documents
> >signed by Pope. According to:
> >
> >http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,13509-2005615,00.html
> >
> >and several other newspapers all these documents are copyrighted, and
> >Vatical officials are currently trying impose strict copyright.
> >
> >We have quite a lot of this stuff in Wikisources. See for example:
> >
> >http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_Encyclicals
> >
> >and
> >
> >http://pl.wikisource.org/wiki/Kategoria:Religia
> >
> >What should we do with this? Send a formal letter to the Vatican,
> >asking for GFDL or PD licence agreement - or we should simply delete
> >all these documents?
> >
> >--
> >Tomek "Polimerek" Ganicz
> >http://www.ceti.pl/kganicz/poli/kontakt.html
> >
> >
> As an independent soverign nation, the Vatican is free to do many things
> in regard to copyright law that would normally not be acceptable in most
> other countries, including retroactive copyright and other weird issues
> as well.  The problem here is to see what sort of copyright enforcement
> would generally be enforced through international treaties (is the
> Vatican a member of the international copyright convention?) and general
> common sense on things like this.  Common sense would seem to indicate
> that the older encyclicals from the 19th Century and earlier would be
> reasonable to keep on Wikisource, although I could see the Vatican even
> trying to assert copyright on that as well.
>
> As far as sending a letter to the Vatican, I think it would be a very
> good idea, but try to really do a good job of explaining the goals of
> Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, and point out how we are trying
> to make faithful reproductions of these documents and to try and keep
> them in context as well.  In addition, point out that by having this
> documentation available on Wikisource that we are making this content
> available to people in not just wealthy countries, but some of the
> poorer countries of the world including to people who don't necessarily
> even have internet access and through multiple languages.  There are
> many other points I'm sure you could come up with to really hit the
> point home, and I would recommend that you get some Roman Catholics,
> preferably some Catholic clergy who are also active Wikimedians (there
> must be a few somewhere) to help draft the letter.  The purpose here is
> to try to use language styles that fits within the heirarchical culture
> of the Church rather than catch phrases common to Wikimedians.

We have at least one clergy user on the dutch wikipedia
http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gebruiker:broederhugo
not sure wich specific religion tho.

henna
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