So how about that non-EU section? Having looked into copyright law, I find that there are two primary theories of copyright:
1. It is a 'natural right', a property right lasting forever, and national laws merely shorten copyright and remove it from certain things. This is the view taken traditionally in many Continental European countries. Under this legal tradition, corporations cannot hold initial copyright; it is always held by one or more individuals and assigned to corporations. 2. It is not a natural right. It is a government-granted monopoly, and as such is subject to severe restrictions. This is the view taken traditionally in the UK, and the view embedded permanently in the United States Constitution (despite whatever garbage rulings certain corrupt, corporate-owned courts might come up with). See the plaintiffs' arguments in Golan v. Ashcroft. Under this legal tradition, incidentally, corporations *can* hold initial copyright to works 'made for hire'. Contrary to common perception, there is no such thing as an 'international copyright'. All that international copyright treaties do is the following: if you have copyright in a work first published or written in one country, you receive the same treatment in every country as if you had written and published it there. In particular, if your work is not copyrightable in a particular country, you gain no extra rights there. If copyright lasts five years in a particular country, you only get five years copyright protection there. There's no such thing as a "Berne copyright". If your work is not copyrightable in its country of origin, you can generally obtain copyright in a country where it is copyrightable simply by publishing it there, although many countries have registration requirements for such circumstances (often left over from earlier versions of their copyright laws and forgotten about). Under US law, word lists and phone books are not copyrightable (given a few days I could probably find the court case). US government documents are not copyrightable. Copyright cannot be restored to works which have lost it for any reason (despite the unconstitutional passage of the URAA). None of these are true under continental European law; European government documents are often copyrighted and under restrictive licenses; there's the infamous Database Directive, but it just reinforces existing Continental law. The Internet has of course led to a nasty set of jurisdictional debates. However, despite the attempt of the French government to claim that anything on the Internet is subject to French jurisdiction, and a similar claim made by California, these theories of 'universal jurisdiction' simply aren't going to fly; enough judges understand the jurisdictional issues to strike down such claims. Copyright law isn't going to synchronize to the European mold, despite the best efforts of corporate Hollywood, because they'll never get a constitutional amendment passed. And it's very unlikely to synchronize to the US mold because the current trend among people who pay lobbyists is in the other direction. Accordingly, the correct way to distribute as much free stuff as possible is to have servers located in different countries distributing things which are free there. I think there's a very good case for starting a 'non-EU' section. Word lists are unequivocally uncopyrightable in the US, no matter where they originated (they could be lifted straight out of a dictionary by a European), and Debian should distribute them. In continental Europe, word lists are often copyrightable and therefore the status of the word lists is unclear. The differing lengths of patents is another issue. If the LZW patent is (next year) void in the US and valid in Germany, we certainly want to distribute code implementing LZW, but not from German servers. The copyright to "Peter Pan" is immortal in the UK by act of Parliament. "Peter Pan" is in the public domain in the United States, and has been for many years. If I want to add the text of Peter Pan as a Debian package, it needs a 'non-UK' division. So in conclusion, a non-EU section is an extremely good idea, for safety; there's a lot of stuff which is inherently public domain in the US but not necessarily in Europe. :-( --Nathanael