[Foundation-l] Copyright of Vatican stuff

Wed Jan 25 21:54:49 UTC 2006

Robert Scott Horning 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.
>
> It is likely that the Vatican is simply going to reply that they have 
> their own website, and internet users can download the content from 
> there instead if they really want to get network access to the 
> documents.  It is worth a try to ask somebody from the Vatican however.
>