User talk:Bottler45

File:OTTO WEININGER (THEODOR LESSING) english translation.pdf—we need to talk
Hi. I think we may have an issue. Let me see if I understand this work, it is an article that first appeared in German in "Der jüdischen Sebsthaß" and that was published in 1930. What you have brought here is your translation of that work. Correct?

Works published in 1930 outside of the US would generally be considered within copyright, with such works not being out of copyright until 2026 (95+ post publishing). Please ping me when you reply. — billinghurst  sDrewth  00:23, 11 October 2019 (UTC)

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Hi Billinghurst. Thanks for your input. I am still not sure about the best way to set up a translation page, but you interpreted the text correctly. It is my translation of a chapter of a German book published in 1930 in Germany and available in full on Internet Archive ( https://archive.org/details/DerJdischeSelbsthass ) and in part on Wikisource ( https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Index:Der_j%C3%BCdische_Selbstha%C3%9F.pdf ).

I had not understood that US law goes above and beyond the Berne Convention when it comes to protecting foreign copyright. The German copyright should have expired in 2004 at latest, 70 years after Lessing's death in 1933. But it seems that in general you are correct: US law grants copyright to foreign works for 95 years.

Some questions immediately arise concerning the present case: is US copyright law an issue in general, for all of Wikisource or only for the English wikisource? Are the German wikisource and Internet Archives texts of the source book available as open source because they are perhaps hosted outside the US or are they in some gray area?

Naturally, I find it quite confusing that a text could be protected from translation or any other manipulation, while seeming to be fully open source in its original form.


 * Since the Wikimedia Foundation is incorporated in the US and has its servers in the US, all of the Wikimedia projects should be obeying US law. It's deeply controversial among editors, and many projects just follow local law for some variety of local.
 * The Internet Archive hosts a huge collection of stuff, including large collections of stuff clearly under copyright, like magazines from the 1980s and complete collections of ROMs for various video game systems. They are, at best, not diligent at following any copyright law.--Prosfilaes (talk) 17:39, 14 October 2019 (UTC)
 * I politely dissent from acknowledging the authority of any one government to dictate for the whole world when content may be made available. In the specific case at hand, I furthermore tend to think that the issue is much more a bugaboo than a threat, although I understand that there are many cases of the threat being quite real.  At any rate, I am sufficiently discouraged not to proceed with making a page for my translation.  I'm not quite sure how to remove what I have uploaded.
 * Copyright law is complex, and when you add in international copyright law the situation is downright baroque. In theory, a global project like Wikisource is subject to all copyright law everywhere; but as that is clearly both ridiculous and unworkable the Wikimedia Foundation and the communities at the different projects have, after much discussion, settled on a reasonable compromise position. All content hosted on any Wikimedia project must be either freely licensed or in the public domain in the United States, because that is where the servers are hosted and that's where the Wikimedia Foundation is incorporated. In addition, it is generally required that works must be similarly free in their country of origin (which, e.g. the policy on Wikimedia Commons requires), but individual projects within the movement are permitted to deviate from this. On English Wikisource the policy is that works must be compatibly licensed in the US alone.Thus, what appears at first glance as an arbitrary (I might even say "imperialistic") imposition, is actually a vast simplification.It also has some advantages: works published anywhere in the world before 1924 are generally in the public domain in the US regardless of their copyright status in their home country. The downside is that since the US copyright regime does not apply the rule of the shorter term, and itself has a rather long term of protection, some works that are in the public domain in their home countries are still protected by copyright in the US. In other words, it is a tradeoff.I am sorry that you have found this experience discouraging. Trust me, we're no happier about the baroque and unbalanced state of copyright legislation than you appear to be, but we're forced to deal with it as it exists. I hope you find some other project here you might like to contribute to, and please do feel free to ask if you need assistance!If you wish to have your work on this article deleted, the simplest procedure would be to use the template to request speedy deletion under criteria G7 (author request). Just put the text   on the pages and someone will be along shortly to delete them. --Xover (talk) 12:29, 17 October 2019 (UTC)