Project:The copyright status of Wittgenstein’s works: Difference between revisions

Its country of origin is the US.<ref name="simultaneous">According to the Berne Convention, “for works published simultaneously in several countries of the Union which grant different terms of protection, the country of origin will be the country with the shortest term of protection”. The definition of “simultaneous publication” is publication in multiple countries within 30 days. We haven’t been able to prove that in the 1950s the ''Journal of Philosophy'' consistently reached its European subscribers within 30 days of the publication in the US, but we haven’t been able to conclusively rule it out either. If it were possible to prove that this was the case, then the ''Notes on Logic'' would count as simultaneously published in the US and in Europe; therefore, per the Berne Convention, they would have European countries as their country of origin; therefore, per the copyright laws of European countries, they would now be in the public domain in their country of origin.</ref> In order to determine the copyright status of a work which has the US as its country of origin, knowledge of the date of the author’s death is not sufficient. Per the Hirtle Chart [link], the current copyright status of a work first published in the US between 1927 and 1964 depends on whether or not it was published with a copyright notice (which we should assume was the case) and, if it was, on whether or not copyright was renewed before its expiry, the term of which was then 28 years: if copyright was renewed, the text is still copyrighted in the US; if it wasn’t, the text is now in the public domain in the US. Although a relatively small percentage of the works from this period had their copyright renewed with the US copyright office, it should not be assumed that this issue of the ''Journal of Philosophy'' was not. In order to determine until what date the text will be copyrighted, it would be necessary to know the details of the renewal; in what would be a worst case scenario from the point of view of free culture, the date would be calculated as follows: the text was published in 1957 and copyright was renewed at the latest possible moment before expiry, i.e., in 1957 + 28 = 1985; the second term, in 1985, had a duration of 47 years, meaning that it will expire in 1985 + 47 = 2032 and the text will enter the public domain in the US on 1 January 2033.

However, in February 2017 the text of Wittgenstein’s Ts-201a1 and Ts-201a2 were released by the copyright holders – The Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge; Bertrand Russell Archives at McMaster University Library, Hamilton, Ontario; University of Bergen, Bergen – under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence. Therefore, the text should be regarded as being in the public domain in countries where the copyright term is 70 years P.M.A. and licenced under CC BY-NC 4.0 International in the US. As was discussed above in this essay (see [[#Copyright in the age of the internet|§ Copyright in the age of the internet]]), a work being in the public domain in its country of origin is not a requirement for it to be freely reusable, remixable etc. elsewhere, but rather a generally accepted good practice when the work is to be published on the internet; because of the internet’s lack of national boundaries, that is, we consider it a good compromise to always make sure that we abide by the rules both of a work’s country of origin and of the country where the work is used, remixed, etc. The situation is similar when a work is not in the public domain in its country of origin but rather is licenced under the terms of a non-free Creative Commons licence such as CC BY-NC: we always want to abide by the rules both of a work’s country of origin and of the country where the work is used, remixed, etc. In this case, this means treating the work (Wittgenstein’s original text) as though it was also licenced under CC BY-NC in Italy. Now, CC BY-NC does not prohibit derivative works (for it does not include the “ND”, “NoDerivatives” clause), nor does it require derivative works to be licenced under the same terms (for it does not include the “SA”, “ShareAlike” clause). Therefore, the LWP’s translations have been published under CC BY-SA.