[WikiEN-l] Copyright situation

Thu Aug 4 11:56:06 UTC 2005

I am having a problem with several Iran-related articles and photos.
Someone ([[User:Zereshk]]), who has posted a lot of text and pictures
copyrighted in Iran to the Wikipedia is claiming that:

"Iranian websites are not legally protected under International
copyright laws. Iran is not a member of WTO, nor a signatory to the
Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works,
and correspondingly does not adhere to International Copyright laws
itself. [...] Wikipedia (an American company) is not legally
responsible for anything even if something was copied from a website
from Iran." [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Roozbeh#Copyright_tags_are_unwarranted]

For the record, there are copyright laws in Iran, and it protects art,
literature, and software first distributed in Iran. There is no
restriction about material produced by the government either. The
government can claim copyright on things. I have a few books
copyrighted by the Iranian government and several websites of the
government claim copyright protection.

I seriously believe that the Wikimedia foundation should either: a)
refrain from using copyrighted material from Iran, or, b) stop
providing its content to readers in Iran.

Otherwise, it would be infringing the Iranian copyright law.

I wanted to ask here for any advice on where to pursue the matter, a
list, a wiki page, or with the foundation authorities. I need an
answer about this. If the Wikimedia foundation thinks it can copy
material copyrighted in Iran freely and provide them to Iranian
readers freely, I would want to know that. (It will also help us in
the Persian Wikipedia if that is the case, we will have a vast source
of free information that way.)

Roozbeh