Talk:Copyright status of works by the federal government of the United States

Removing Primary Sources Hatnote?
Article has a hatnote saying that it references too many primary sources. I don't see places in article where this is a problem and suspect that editor who placed the note may not have had a complete understanding of when a source is primary or secondary. --Federalist51 (talk) 00:40, 18 December 2023 (UTC)

Protection expired - please heed WP:BRD
Good day,

In order to avoid another round of full protection, editors are reminded to adhere, strictly, to the principle of Bold, Revert, Discuss when editing existing content. For the purpose of clarity, the present revision at the time of this writing should be considered the starting point of a WP:BRD cycle.

Last but not least, this talk page is peppered with comments directed at other editors that serve no editorial purpose. Editors are encouraged to focus on content, not each other, and concentrate on improving the article for the benefit of Wikipedia's readers. MLauba (Talk) 12:32, 2 October 2013 (UTC)


 * Greetings, I have been struggling thru some of these same issues with my work on the Wiki-project United States Government articles ( see my [|user page]. Finally, I was able to locate a legal briefing on FOIA and public domain for one of the Federal agencies that uses contractors for agency services. It says they are considered to be employees of the government and therefore, their work is public domain. I have uploaded this material onto Wikisource. (See the article.) I would propose rewriting the section in this Wikipedia article to recognize that in Federal procurements there are instances where materials provided by contractors remain the contractor's intellectual property (such as software code, etc.) and there are those where the contractor's product becomes public domain. Risk Engineer (talk) 12:49, 31 July 2014 (UTC)

California and Florida- inaccurate wording?
The section State, territorial and local governments states "Notably, the constitutions and laws of California and Florida have placed their government's works in the public domain." However, the relevent sections in Copyright status of work by U.S. subnational governments only refer to "public records", which may not be identical to "government work". If they are equivalent under the law, this should be clarified. Cheers. --Animalparty-- (talk) 07:09, 9 December 2014 (UTC)

External links modified
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 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20110211214553/http://ipmall.info:80/hosted_resources/CopyrightCompendium/chapter_0200.asp to http://ipmall.info/hosted_resources/CopyrightCompendium/chapter_0200.asp
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20110211214553/http://ipmall.info:80/hosted_resources/CopyrightCompendium/chapter_0200.asp to http://ipmall.info/hosted_resources/CopyrightCompendium/chapter_0200.asp
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20110211214553/http://ipmall.info:80/hosted_resources/CopyrightCompendium/chapter_0200.asp to http://ipmall.info/hosted_resources/CopyrightCompendium/chapter_0200.asp
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20110211214553/http://ipmall.info:80/hosted_resources/CopyrightCompendium/chapter_0200.asp to http://ipmall.info/hosted_resources/CopyrightCompendium/chapter_0200.asp

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copied from study report
Unfortunately it appears that much of this text is copied directly from the study report. That's not copyright infringement (since the work is public domain as this article documents) but it is not properly cited -- right now, the text is not marked as quoted, just as cited; so one would think this is Wikipedia-editor-created prose, backed up by the cited study. Instead it's apparently copied from that study, and should be cited more properly as such, with page numbers; or paraphrased. I'll work on cleaning this up as I can -- I've already done the work on the Printing_Act_of_1895 -- but if there are other editors on these pages please help. --Lquilter (talk) 15:18, 3 May 2017 (UTC)

Outside the USA
US legislation makes (most) works created by the US federal government public domain. But EU law does not incorporate The Printing Law of 1895, as far as I am aware. In the EU, the only way a work can become public domain is for its copyright to expire; before that, the moral rights of the author apply.

So it seems that a US federal document such as | this one is in the public domain only within US jurisdiction. It might be possible for the US government to assert copyright in such a document in an EU court.

So I feel rather queasy about | this article, which incorporates material from a federal report, alleging that it is in the public domain. Just because Wikipedia operates out of the USA, doesn't necessarily mean that it can't be sued in the EU. Can anyone clarify? MrDemeanour (talk) 12:41, 9 September 2018 (UTC)
 * It's allowed by Wikipedia's copyright policy. See also Wikipedia's policy defining its public domain boundaries, which does mention "It's not clear this applies worldwide" and links out to discussions you might find interesting, but that it does apply on Wikipedia. If it makes you feel less queasy, you can think about it as work-for-hire and the employer dedicating the product to the public domain. There's also the Berne Convention's right to quote. lethargilistic (talk) 15:56, 9 September 2018 (UTC)


 * What makes me queasy is not that we've incorporated it; It's that the article claims that the material is public domain, when it is only public domain in the USA (possibly). WP is supposed to be re-usable in its entirely, anywhere.


 * Also, in the cited article, it's not possible to tell which material was taken from the supposedly-public-domain source. I have failed to find any prose from the article in the cited PDF; that could be a limitation of my PDF reader, or of my text-retrieval ninja skillz. If we don't know what was taken from a non-free source, then the entire article is tainted.


 * I was just trying to clean up the COPYVIO complaint in the article; it got messy. Sorry. MrDemeanour (talk) 21:20, 9 September 2018 (UTC)

Move discussion in progress
There is a move discussion in progress on Talk:Copyright status of work by the Florida government which affects this page. Please participate on that page and not in this talk page section. Thank you. —RMCD bot 01:01, 15 January 2019 (UTC)