[Foundation-l] Copyright on Wikisource

Wed Mar 15 22:33:32 UTC 2006

Hoi,
The idea of fair use is broken when you make it as complicated as
this.Things are broken. They are broken because on the one hand the
en:wikipedia does not want to give something up ie "fair use"  and on
the other hand we do not want to consider licenses for Commons that
are legal, that allow us to have content that only the en:wikipedia
now has because of "fair use".

There is nothing fair about having content under "fair use" while it
cannot be had under a ND license and have it legally available for
other projects. In a previous threat about fair use people decided
that they do not want to hear about this.. That is an en:POV and it
makes for a parochical POV not the POV that does justice to the needs
of other projects ...

Thanks,
    GerardM

On 3/15/06, Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:
> Yann Forget:
> > Hi,
> >
> > And oh, I forgot to say that if the new rule is to apply French laws to French
> > language projects, then first do it on the French Wikipedia, which goes
> > against French laws in many ways, the first of all by allowing "fair use",
> > then it would be proper to do it on Wikisource.
>
> I think we need to ask two key questions in every case:
>
> 1) What is the nationality of the uploader?
> 2) What is the nationality of the copyright holder of the work?
>
> If the answer to either of these question is "French", then it seems to
> me that there is a risk for the uploader, the French Chapter, or the
> U.S. Foundation to be sued in a French court.
>
> To me, this is independent of the language of the Wikimedia project in
> question; the French Wikipedia is not inherently tied to the nation of
> France, nor is the English Wikipedia tied to the United States.
>
> Since the text(s) you would like to see reproduced were written by a
> French author, I would advise against hosting them on our servers for
> that reason. It's quite simple: Unless we explicitly deny access to this
> content from French users, we provide them with illegal copies of this
> material, and a French court is likely to find so. Denying access in
> this fashion would obviously be undesirable.
>
> As for the "fair use" policy of the French Wikipedia, I believe that the
> policies in question should not be applicable to material created by
> French copyright holders, unless there is a similar applicable "fair
> use" exemption in French copyright law. In general, uploaders of French
> nationality should be made aware that they may be in violation of French
> law if they upload copyrighted material to an American server under the
> U.S. "fair use" doctrine.
>
> I'm in favor of limited fair use on all projects, simply because there
> are materials (logos, cartoon characters etc.) of which we will never be
> able to obtain reproductions under free licenses. On the other hand,
> making all fair use images go through a review process is probably a
> good idea. We need to find a reasonable balance and strive for
> harmonization of said balance across the Wikimedia projects.
>
> Erik
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