[WikiEN-l] copyright on old paintings

Mon Aug 25 21:18:20 UTC 2003

The Bridgeman case was a British publisher; it is important to
remember the national treatment principle in international copyright law.
The regarguement in Bridgeman surrounded around the question of
applying British law to infringement under US law.  It was put aside
because the British case on which Bridgeman relied was no longer
good law in the UK (it was an 1865 that said a photograph that was
just a copy of something else was copyrightable because at that
time it was not just "slavish copying" as it is now considered.

Is such an  issue of applying another countries law in the US
a possibility for Wikipedia? Yes. Will someone bring an infringement
suit? I doubt it because Wikipedia has a very strong fair use AND
fair dealing defense (depending on the country). Regarding privacy
rights Wikipedia's NPOV approach will also make any lawsuit
that might deal with such privacy invasions a nonsuit, after all if
someone does not like what they read on Wikipedia they can change
it and make it more accurate. It is probably the problem of the
person posting the information rather than the Wikipedia collective;
there is a strong argument that Wikipedia cannot police its own
content and thus cannot be responsible for copyright violations,
libel or any other tort that might be committed by its volunteers;
the volunteer attempts at policing are laudable, but in and of themselves
doing so does not appear to create any kind of obligation to do so;
after all Wikipedia does not have any resources to apply to such
due dilligence.

Anyway, the publicity from any infringement/privacy suit
will be good for Wikipedia, no? 

Of course Wikipedia 1.0 will have to have much higher standards 
as it will be a fixed product.

Alex756

From: "Jimmy Wales" <jwales at bomis.com>

> Daniel Mayer wrote:
> > But what is legal to have on the Wikimedia server is a separate
> > issue and only the laws of the United States and California apply to
> > that.
> 
> One caveat that I would like to introduce here is that we do want
> Wikipedia to be easily redistributable in the majority of countries
> around the world.  Therefore _some_ concession to non-U.S. law is
> warranted in _some_ cases.
> 
> But really, this sort of discussion is generally just fun abstraction,
> since I'm not sure that there are really that many cases in which the
> copyright or censorship laws of the countries we're most interested in
> actually restrict us much.