[Foundation-l] Help requested on Commons copyright woes

Fri Jul 21 18:13:33 UTC 2006

Oldak Quill wrote:

>>On Thu, July 20, 2006 13:00, Brianna Laugher wrote:
>>    
>>
>>>Here are some recent issues that I would like resolved:
>>>* To what extent are we bound by local laws and to what extent are we
>>>bound by Florida's laws (as the home of our servers).
>>>      
>>>
>Will the placing of some media servers in countries with more liberal
>copyright laws ever be a viable option? Even if we housed some media
>in, say, Sweden, would the content still be judged by the standards of
>Florida because that is where the Foundation is based?
>
To a large extent this is unanswerable, and waiting for legal certainty 
is a sure road to paralysis.  The laws of Florida on copyright matters 
do not have a big impact on what we do since copyright is a federal 
matter in the United States.  There may be slight variations from one 
state to another or from one federal judicial district to another, but 
in carving out broad policy on copyright it is probably reasonable to 
say that what applies in one U.S. state will also apply in all the others.

As things stand US copyright laws in many of the aspects that concern us 
are at the liberal end of the scale.  In particular the United States 
has developed the fair use concept more than most other countries.  
There are also other peculiar features to U.S. law that have been since 
repealed, but are nevertheless grandfathered that give some advantages 
to having U.S. law apply at least until the year 2046.  If the laws of 
Sweden or any other country were to be made applicable it should be 
based on a positive case for that being made by the proponents.  That 
case would of course include an examination of the relevant laws of that 
country.

In my mind the only positive case that exists so far is for Wikisource 
to include certain materials on servers in countries with a Berne 
Convention life + 50 expiry on copyrights.  Project Gutenberg appears to 
have done this successfully on Australian servers before that country 
changed its copyright laws.  The important thing in those circumstances 
would be to have those servers under the control of that national 
organization and with a top level domain in that country.

For now, I can see no other practical situation where this would apply. 

Ec