[Wikisource-l] Copyright issues on Wikisource

Sat Nov 4 02:54:56 UTC 2006

On 11/3/06, Luiz Augusto <lugusto at gmail.com> wrote:
> If a policy for all Wikisources is going to be based in the USA laws and
> ignore all international agreements, lots of works that are in public domain
> in anothers countries but not in the USA needs to be deleted. Lots of works
> from brazilians and portugueses writers that died more than 70 years... Is
> more simple to respect the copyright from the contry of origin (and make
> attempts to change the stupid 100 years after death law in the USA).
>

Local communities should not decide not to apply US copyright law. The
Foundation is legally based in the United States, so US law applies.
If it is copyrighted in the United States it is unacceptable,
regardless of its status elsewhere.

Whether to include works that are copyrighted elsewhere is a less
important point. Although doing so increases the possible repertoire,
it also reduces the usefulness of that repertoire outside the United
States. The English Wikisource attempts to balance this by carefully
categorizing such works[1] so that they can be excluded at will.

Perfectly synchronizing the copyright policies may prove to be more
effort than its worth, and alienate a lot of contributors. For
example, the English Wikisource has a more or less restrictive
copyright policy, which generally only allows clear-cut public domain
or GFDL-compatible works. I would be very displeased if this policy
were blurred in the synchronization. Likewise, I imagine many users on
other subdomains would be very displeased to see many works deleted if
their local policies were made more restrictive.

A possible solution is to have a global copyright policy that all
Wikisource subdomains must respect, but leave the finer points to the
individual projects. For example, consider the following simplistic
statements.

Global policy:
* must be clearly PD or GFDL-compatible in the US;
* must not be fair use;
* must allow commercial use and redistribution.

Some local policy:
* must not be/may be copyrighted in the country of origin.

This kind of division would place every subdomain within US law, but
allow the local communities to decide for themselves the finer details
within that law.

[1] [http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Category:Public_domain_outside_the_United_States]
and [http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Category:Public_domain_in_the_United_States].

Kind regards,
Jesse Martin
(en-Wikisource administrator 'Pathoschild')