[Foundation-l] Copyright of Vatican stuff

Wed Jan 25 22:32:40 UTC 2006

Thanks for thinking of me guys, but this one is way over my head. True, my
specialty is canon law, but there is a big difference between canon law and
Vatican law; assuming they plan to enforce it, the Vatican isn't going to be
issuing excommunications for violation of the new rules, it's going to be
suing. What you need is a copyright attorney (Soufron?), not a canon lawyer.
That said, if anyone gets excommunicated over it, I'm your man.

By the way, if we're worried about the implications of the Vatican's rules
under US law (and we usually hear "it's US law that matters, since the
servers are in the US") the USCCB (United States Conference of Catholic
Bishops) would be a good place to contact; they should be able to offer
guidance. The Office of the General Counsel can be reached at
ogc at usccb.orgor by phone/mail at (202)
541-3000 / Office of the General Counsel, 3211 4th Street N.E., Washington
DC 20017-1194.

If there is anything else I can do, let me know.

Essjay

On 1/25/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
>
> 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.
> >
>
>
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Essjay
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