[Foundation-l] EDP: US servers loophole?

Wed Apr 4 22:40:04 UTC 2007

Thank you for the answers, so far. Let me rephrase my problem.

Hungarian copyright law does have something similar to "fair use"
called "szabad felhasználás". This is, however, just like in Germany
much more limited than its US counterpart.

The interpretation of the law is not always easy, but after some very
informal discussions with some Hungarian lawyers and copyright
experts, we do know that there are classes of images that you can't
distribute without the copyright holder's permission in Hungary.
This seems to be the case for album covers, movie posters etc.

So far, we permitted these in HuWiki based on the fact, that the
servers are located in the US, therefore we can rely the more liberal
US "fair use" concept. We marked them with warning messages that these
are not free images, and might be deleted in the future.

However, it is my understanding that with the Resolution, the
Foundation's intent was to close this loophole and make the projects
accept rules that don't make it illegal to distribute the content in
their home countries without breaking the law.

Disclosure: I'm a free content person and would prefer a solution
similar to EsWiki, DeWiki and others where they only allow images from
Commons. But there are several other editors who would rather have
more images and don't really worry about copyright, free content and
ease of reuse as long as their articles are well illustrated.

We started to draft our EDP, but it would be nice to have this
clarification from the Foundation: do they want the projects to
collect content that is free to redistribute in their home countries
or is it OK, that it doesn't break US copyright laws?

Thanks again,
nyenyec

On 4/5/07, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> Gregory Maxwell wrote:
>
> >On 4/3/07, Nyenyec N <nyenyec at gmail.com> wrote:
> >[snip]
> >
> >
> >>Let's take album covers as an example. Hungary, just like Germany
> >>doesn't have a broad equivalent of "fair use". According to Hungarian
> >>law, album covers cannot be distributed without permission.
> >>
> >>
> >I think we need a FAQ point that says:
> >
> >Q: "But my country doesn't have anything like fair use / fair dealing"
> >A: "You're probably incorrect."
> >
> >See the current Hungarian copyright act, (Act LXXVI of 1999, I have no
> >clue how to cite Hungarian law).
> >
> >I'm fairly confidence that you have some degree of fair use, ...
> >although it may not be as permissive as US law, the Wikimedia policy
> >is focused on the part of fair use which should be most widely
> >available (the part required to prevent copyright from being used to
> >effectively stop free speech).
> >
> One also needs to consider the extent to which the fair practice
> provisions of the Berne Convention apply to Hungary as a signatory.
>
> Ec
>
>
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