Image talk:Mauthausen-courtyard.jpg

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Delete? Why exactly? If we are to violate the rights of any author, then the author must be known, which is not the case here. We can 100% sure use it as {{fairuse}} anyway, but if the author is unknown, the date of death is unknown as well, not to mention legal ownership. In this case belongs to the successor of Nazi Germany, not to the unknown photographer.

Besides, if you're using the legal arguments, lex retro non agit. In this case the pic was made in, say, 1943. The copyright expired in 25 years, that is in 1968. You can't make it copyrighted back again (if it ever was) by changing the laws after that date - in this case in 1971. Just imagine a state where people would be sentenced to, say, 10 years for some crime, then released, and then put back in jail as soon as the law is changed so that their crime is punishable with, say 15 years. That's absurd. //Halibutt 04:05, 19 July 2006 (UTC)

While I agree that this should be kept (maybe under a "fair use" claim), I'm afraid Halibutt's reasoning is wrong. Copyright laws can be changed to make works already out of copyright under the old law become copyrighted again under the new law. Some examples are the Uruguay Rounds Agreement Act in the U.S. or the EU Directive on harmonising the term of copyright protection. However, unlicensed uses of the work from before the new law became effective are typically not criminalized, only continued or new uses are. Therefore, the lex retro non agit (which should be redirected to ex post facto anyway) is a complete non-sequitur. Lupo 09:46, 19 July 2006 (UTC)

Absurd notwithstanding—when it comes to copyright in the EU, the situation is different. Lupo summed it up:

"the EU Directive on harmonising the term of copyright protection, implemented in German law by §137f. It retroactively puts works that were already out of copyright in 1995 under copyright again if they were still copyrighted in some other EU country. Thus even if their KUG-copyright might have been expired once, they are today under copyright until 70 years p.m.a. (Because Spain has had 70 years p.m.a. (or even 80) since 1879.)" (Commons:Löschanträge#Copyright_status_in_the_U.S.)

The image is not PD, it is still fully covered under the German Urheberrecht.

--Wikipeder 09:38, 19 July 2006 (UTC)

I'm removing the speedy tag. This doesn't fit the speedy deletion criteria that I can see. If anyone still feels this should be deleted, they should list it on WP:IFD. Mangojuice^talk 04:31, 19 July 2006 (UTC)

Okay. I'm changing the tag to "fair use". --Wikipeder 09:38, 19 July 2006 (UTC)

Wikipeder et al., correct me if I'm wrong. Does this new law mean, that a German picture, published in Germany, by a (most probably) German author who made it as part of his duties for the German government and went our of copyright as per the contemporary German laws is now subject to Spanish law? Or is the reasoning that "if it would've been published in Spain, by a Spanish author who made it (...) and would still be copyrighted under the Spanish law, then it's currently subject to Spanish copyright? I don't get it. //Halibutt 15:19, 19 July 2006 (UTC)

You can't just look at the country of origin. The German picture in your example was copyrighted all along in Spain, and has become copyrighted again in Germany due to that EU directive, which was effective July 1, 1995. See also WP:PD#World_War_II_images for a concrete example on which there even was a court case in Germany. But note that this has nothing to do with Germany alone: within the whole EU, it is pretty futile to argue with copyright expiration under some old laws since that directive has been passed, regardless of the country. That's because Spain had a very strict copyright law already long ago (and apparently no rule of the shorter term), and most images that might have fallen out of copyright in other EU member countries still were copyrighted in Spain and thus became copyrighted again all over the EU in 1995. The EU had the (stupid or glorious, depending on one's POV) idea to say, "look, we want to harmonize copyright terms to have a uniform treatment of works all across the EU. What do we do with images out of copyright in one country, but still protected in another country? Simple, we apply the longer term and make the image copyrighted all over the EU." The alternative would have been to take the shorter term and make the image PD all over the EU, but that's not what they did. (Probably because rights holders would've complained loudly if a previously long copyright term had been cut short.) For us, this is pretty unfortunate, but we can't change it. Lupo 19:04, 19 July 2006 (UTC)