[WikiEN-l] Copyright situation

Sat Sep 3 20:00:03 UTC 2005

On 9/4/05, Fastfission <fastfission at gmail.com> wrote:
> I wasn't referring to a copyright provision, I was referring to their other
> well-known restrictive laws. I'm not sure I buy the "ethical validity"
> argument, in part because I'm not so sure I, in my heart of hearts, think
> that copyright is about ethics much these days (and suspect that Iran's lack
> of participation in foreign copyright agreements is done so more for their
> own benefit -- not having to pay foreign copyright holders -- than it does
> in inducing any loss-of-profit for the Iranian government or Iranian
> citizens).
> 
> But anyway -- my response was just meant to say, "Well, I don't think we're
> legally bound to follow Iranian laws on this or much anything else." Even if
> that's *true* (I'm the first to admit I'm not very well versed in
> international law), it doesn't *necessarily* imply any particular course of
> action. The censorship example was just to illustrate that if we tried to
> follow every country's individual content laws about everything, we'd have
> no encyclopedia.

This is something that has been thrashed out many times, including
well before the advent of the Internet. Just because a copy of (say)
The Washington Post might be sent to Iran doesn't mean that TWP has to
follow Iranian laws. It's up to Iran to enforce their own laws in
their own country and nobody is saying otherwise.

But just because we can legally steal images owned by Iranians doesn't
mean we should. For one thing, they might change their copyright law.
But to my mind it's just plain wrong, especially when we have so many
other avenues available, such as fair use, to illustrate our
encyclopaedia.

-- 
Peter in Canberra