User talk:GeoEvan

— billinghurst  sDrewth  01:50, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

Azawad Declaration of Independence
Regarding your deletion of the Azawad Declaration of Independence - I'll defer to your judgment on the copyright of the original French version (I take it that public domain is not to be assumed by default regarding publications by governments other than that of the U.S.). But I want to at least let you know that the English version was uploaded here with the express written permission of the translator (me), though this may not have been documented properly on Wikisource. I don't fully understand how copyright works with translations, so I'll again defer to your judgement there - but if there would be any basis for restoring the English document to the wiki based on the translator's permission, let me know and I can provide whatever licensing documentation is necessary. [GeoEvan] (talk) 14:28, 2 July 2012 (UTC)
 * Hi [GeoEvan]. It is a little political and technical. My reason for deleting the work was &hellip;
 * The website from you have taken the French work has a &copy; copyright statement at the base of the page
 * The US has rejected the declaration of independence, so there is not valid argument that it is a government edict
 * accordingly I cannot see that the French language work is in the public domain, and therefore it is subject to the standard copyright. As the French language work is not in the public domain, therefore your English translation cannot be in the public domain whether you wish it to be or not. For English Wikisource to host your translation, the original would need to be released into the public domain as per one of the choices at Help:Copyright tags, identified as such at the source, then you would need to similarly licence your translation, and generally we would do that via an OTRS permission. — billinghurst  sDrewth  15:06, 2 July 2012 (UTC)
 * Understood. Thanks for clearing that up. Now that you mention it, the copyright statement on the source site should have been a giveaway. The relevance of the U.S. rejecting the declaration, on the other hand, hadn't occurred to me. Is that because Wikisource is operating under U.S. law? And if so, does the U.S. have laws specifically relating to other governments' edicts? [GeoEvan] (talk) 19:54, 2 July 2012 (UTC)
 * Apologies for not saying all of this here when I deleted the work, I should have given my reasoning it was an oversight on my behalf. English Wikisource basis its copyright status based on US law, and it does have specific laws relating to government edicts, and it will be covered in the previous link. To note, that just because someone claims copyright, does not mean that it definitely applies, there are many false/incorrect claims. One of the things that I was looking for would have been a statement on whether it had been released to the public under a Creative Commons licence. — billinghurst  sDrewth  01:50, 3 July 2012 (UTC)
 * Got it. Thanks for the clarification! And I'll check the Help:Copyright tags link next time. Thanks. :-) [GeoEvan] (talk) 21:47, 3 July 2012 (UTC)