Wikipedia:Copyright situations by country

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The following list gives the current copyright situation in various countries, briefly describing which works are considered in the public domain in each country. This is useful for determining whether a work can be freely used in Wikipedia or not. Please see Wikipedia:Public domain for more information on the "public domain".

Keep in mind that any work first published before 1923 is considered in the public domain in the United States, regardless of the work's copyright status in its country of origin. Also, note that countries may change their copyright laws at any time, and these laws may or may not be retroactive to works previously in the public domain. Some countries may follow the rule of the shorter term for foreign works (notably the EU and Japan); other may not (e.g. the U.S.). And in general, a work may be in the public domain in one country but still be copyrighted in other countries.

[edit] Abbreviations used

  • No treaty indicates that the U.S. does not have a copyright treaty with this country, so works created by residents of this country are not protected by copyright in the U.S.
  • Life+X means that the work is in the public domain if the author died more than X years before the end of the current year.
  • Treaty:Life+X means that according to a treaty the country has signed, it has agreed to extend its copyright protection to Life+X, but it has not yet done so.

For some special cases, we also use the following abbreviations:

  • Post(X):Publ+Y means that works first published posthumously within X years after the death of the (last surviving) author are protected for Y years since the publication.
  • Rehab+X means that works of authors who have been posthumously rehabilitated are copyrighted for X years since the rehabilitation (not the death of the author). This is the case in some successor countries of the former USSR, notably Russia.
  • Unpubl+X means that if a previously unpublished work is published for the first time after its original copyright had expired, the publisher is granted the exclusive publication right for a period of X years since that eventual first publication. This is the case in the EU, but also in some successor countries of the USSR.

See also Commons:Licensing.

[edit] List

[edit] Sources

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o For most successor states of the former USSR and the three Baltic states Estland, Latvia, and Lithuania, up-to-date English transcriptions of the current copyright laws are available at CIPR.
  2. ^ Ley sobre Derecho de Autor; Ley 14, December 28, 1977, last modified 1994.
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