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In the list of Europeans entering the public domain in Europe several Americans are listed. Should we remove them?
No. The nationality is not relevant - what is being discussed is when the copyright in that particular territory expires. So, for the authors in the EU list, it is the copyright in the EU countries that expired on New Year's Eve regardless of where they're from. Harris (talk) 09:06, 2 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]
I don't see that it's necessary to remove them. Works do not fall into some universal "public domain" all over the world if they would be out of copyright in some other country where they were not published. What matters is the laws of the country of publication, the citizenship of the author, and the nature of copyright treaties between the countries concerned. For example, here in Canada, a work produced by a Canadian author and published in Canada will fall out of copyright 50 years after the author's death, and there is here a legal definition of “public domain” (but it is not necessarily the same legal definition used in other countries - in particular, treatment of moral rights of an author may vary). The Berne Convention means that works published in co-signatory countries are indeed in the public domain in Canada 50 years after the death of the author, but that does not necessarily make it acceptable to make the work available to people in countries where the work is still covered by copyright. Note also that the US did not join the Berne Convention until 1988, and protection to foreign authors was not enforced until much more recently; it might be that US works made before 1988 would not be covered. Barefootliam (talk) 19:02, 23 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
