[WikiEN-l] Re: U.S. copyright law and European servers

Thu Jul 14 23:56:10 UTC 2005

> The incorporation of "fair use" images in Wikipedia ensures that the
> encyclopaedia as a whole cannot straightforwardly be
> used/redistributed outside of the US.

As I keep pointing out "fair use" images aren't
the only problem. Wikipedia has many photographs
of old artworks. The photographs themselves are
explicitly protected by copyright law in Europe
but not in the United States as the Bridgeman
ruling showed.

So, many of the images tagged "pd-art" or with
other pd-tags aren't actually in the public
domain in Europe.

And then there are books published before 1923
in Europe. Those are in the public domain in
the United States but often not in Europe.
The artwork of [[Arthur Rackham]] is a good
example. A British reuser would do well to
be careful in using those, their pd-tags
notwithstanding. Currently few people pay
attention to this as is demonstrated by the
fact that one of these images was recently
promoted to a featured picture. The featured
pictures are the images on Wikipedia that
have received the greatest scrutiny, including
scrutiny of their license.

And I hear there may be problems with public
domain images from U.S. federal agencies outside
of the United States.

All in all a version of Wikipedia stripped of
all images that could be problematic outside
the United States would be stripped of *many*
good images. I don't really think that's a good
course to take. We should, however, be careful
to tag everything clearly.

Regards,
Haukur