File talk:Highways Agency.svg

Wrong Licence

This file is wrong tagged as being non-free it is a logo consisting of the letters HA and the words Highways agency and fails to reach Threshold of originality to be protected by US copyright law, it should be tagged {{PD-ineligible-USonly|the United Kingdom}}. LightGreenApple _{talk to me} 23:56, 28 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

As a work of Her Majesty's Government, the image is covered by Crown Copyright irrespective of any "threshold of originality". As it is currently copyrighted in the United Kingdom, per Berne Convention it is protected by copyright in the United States and elsewhere. kashmiri 00:54, 29 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

That is incorrect. The Berne Convention does not require that at all. Inside the borders of the UK, British law would determine copyrightability, but inside U.S. borders, only U.S. law determines that. The Berne Convention requires that the U.S. provide the same protection for foreign authors that its own citizens get, but no more than that. For example, if a work was considered copyrightable in the U.S. but was not in the UK, then a British author of such a work could press a copyright claim in the U.S., but not in the UK. If this work is below the U.S. threshold (and it almost certainly is), then nobody can press any U.S. copyright claims on it, regardless of what protection it might have within UK borders. While this logo is almost certainly copyrightable in the UK, the U.S. approach to originality is quite a bit different, particularly when it comes to typeface (since the U.S. explicitly says "typeface as typeface" is not copyrightable; the UK has at least one case where a slightly customized letter was deemed to have originality). Whether a copyright would be respected in other countries is dependent on the laws in those countries; the Berne Convention sets some basic standards that all countries must follow in their laws but it does allow for some variation (sometimes quite a bit) in those laws. It most definitely does not mandate that a country apply a foreign country's law rather than its own. Carl Lindberg (talk) 15:27, 28 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]