Talk:Press releases/Public domain day

Let's see if I have this all straight.

• Life + 70 years (done by calendar year) defines entry into the public domain for the UK. It also does, in fact, for Ireland and Austria, so that Freud and Yeats should be OK. See http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Help:Public_domain.
• For the USA, whatever it is, it's not that. So Zane Grey needs to be replaced.
• Wikisource's main yardstick is US public domain. The legal position for it as US-based archive is based on http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/United_States_Code/Title_17/Chapter_1/Section_108; and the interpretation is that not quite all works we are talking about could be placed there. Wikilivres operates from Canada and provides a fallback.
• As for Commons: Speex would be the preferred file format for speech recordings, and in any case the restriction to free file types means something uploaded needs to be in the Ogg family. See http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:File_types#Sound for details.
• Under http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Licensing, it looks like there would be an issue on a recording of late Yeats. It says

"Wikimedia Commons accepts only media

• that are explicitly freely licensed, or
• that are in the public domain in at least the United States and in the source country of the work."

On the face of it we are in trouble on the second point.

Charles Matthews 08:30, 22 December 2009 (UTC)

• I can do WAV or MP3 to OGG trivially. Speex is misdirection; it's a codec for Voice over IP. I'm just going to look for this copyright concern. --Brian McNeil / ^talk 11:03, 22 December 2009 (UTC)
• This is the nasty 'gotcha' in US copyright law....

• for works first published before 1978: until 95 years after the first publication, and
• for works first published 1978 or later: until 70 years after the author's death, or for anonymous works or work made for hire, until the shorter of 95 years since the first publication or 120 years since the creation of the work.
• Works published before 1923 are in the public domain.

So, for Yeats there is a requirement to know when his stuff was published in the US. --Brian McNeil / ^talk 11:10, 22 December 2009 (UTC)

• I'm seeking definitive answers; submitted a query to the Library of Congress asking what of Yeats is PD from next year. Found the following listing on Gutenburg Project. That is safe-bet stuff as far as being PD goes. I might email them as well to see if they can answer faster than LoC. --Brian McNeil / ^talk 14:05, 22 December 2009 (UTC)