[Foundation-l] What can we do? (was: Copyright terms, again)

Thu Nov 11 18:25:53 UTC 2010

It would be good to start discussion about what can we do in relation
to the categories of materials which could be free, but we are not
using them because of extensive fear over possible legal actions.

There are at least two types of materials which are not allowed on
Wikimedia projects:
* Orphan works and
* PD (or ~CC-BY) materials which don't belong to the intersection of
US and local law.

In relation to the orphan works, AFAIK, all legal systems require
reasonable effort to be shown in finding authors. If authors wouldn't
be found after that, works are PD (or ~CC-BY-unknown author). We don't
need to do that for any work, but we can form a body which would deal
with the most important works.

In relation to the intersection, I suppose that the most of Europe
switched from 50 to 70 years after author's death during the end of
1990s or beginning of 2000s. It creates a gap between a couple and
almost 10 years for works which are free according to the local
copyright laws.

Or, even better, AFAIK, Canada has more permissive copyright law and
we can use it to extend the corpus of free knowledge.

I know that Yann  Forget moved (or started?) his project
wikilivres.info to Canada exactly because of that reason. However,
this is not a systemic effort, but personal one.

For example although works published in Serbia of those died up to
1953 are free in Serbia, we are not able to incorporate materials from
1948 to 1953. And I suppose that the similar situation is in relation
with many other countries.

We need to find options for those works. For example, I suppose that
any EU country will follow local law in relation to copyright. And it
would be great if we would have a server in Germany, France, Poland...
for that purpose.

However, this is not the full list of possibilities. Canada should be
the option, too. Other countries? If WMF is not able to hold such
servers, we have chapters.

Thoughts?