Re: fair use policy in other languages

Ray Saintonge wrote:

>There may very well be no fair use provision in German law, but to the 
>extent that Germany is a signatory to international conventions, such as 
>the Berne Convention, which provide for something like fair use, it is 
>incorporated into German law.

There is some Japanese court cases where fair use defense was employed by 
the defendants anyway, even though they knew that such provisions did not 
exist in Japanese law. Their claim was that Japan should adopt something 
like fair use. Not surprisingly, the court has said the defense was not 
valid under Japanese law. Not that we do not have some counterpart. There 
are a number of provisions in japanese law to limit copyrights.

But I think the Berne convention could possibly be used against wikipedians 
- an American copyright holder can seek for the protection of his copyright 
in Japan based on Japanese law (that's what Berne convention provides among 
other things.) So, if an image or a text is fair use, and a Japanese 
wikipedian copy it from english wikipedia to Japanese wikipedia, there is a 
possibility that the fair use part is simply an illegal use of copyrighted 
material in Japanese law.

As I said earlier somewhere, more troublesome is the fair use texts without 
clear indication. Some texts are fair-used without being in the form of 
quotation. Again, Japanese wikipedian or some further downstream user would 
face a trouble if some texts translated from english wikipedia have 
contained some fair use text without any hint of it.

I recall that [[land-grant university]] had such text. Until I googled and 
read some outside documents, I could not tell that there was some external 
texts used in the article. I have no idea how frequently this could happen, 
but I hope the scale of this kind of fair use on wikipedia is limited.

I am hoping this would not cause any serious troubles (I think there are 
some reasons to be optimistic, though there are reasons not to be as well.) 
But if English wikipedia could limit fair use text only to quotes, that 
would help downstream users, I suppose.

regards,

Tomos

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