The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the template below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the template's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the discussion was Delete Plastikspork _―Œ^(talk) 02:26, 12 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Template:PD-MNGov (talk · history · transclusions · logs · subpages)

Template:MNGovernment (talk · history · transclusions · logs · subpages)

Delete as per commons:Commons:Deletion requests/Template:PD-MNGov (2nd nomination). Svgalbertian (talk) 16:42, 3 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment I agree, this is overdue. Wikipedia is not the Commons but the reasoning behind the deletion there applies here, too, imo. Hekerui (talk) 12:40, 4 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Added Template:MNGovernment to the discussion --Svgalbertian (talk) 17:37, 5 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep for now. It seems to me that the rationale is well-based. Can someone specifically state what the problem is? — BQZip01 — ^talk 20:53, 5 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

  Explanation below makes the point more clear. I move my support to Delete — BQZip01 — ^talk 03:14, 6 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete. The rationale for this template is based on this statement from December 1994 which reads, in part, "unless clearly specified by the legislature, the public's right of access to and use of public government data cannot be curtailed by a government entity's claim of intellectual property rights in those data".

The reading of that as meaning "public domain", however, is contradicted by this statement from December 1995 which explicitly references the prior statement and clarifies that it should be read as applying to access to the data, and not the copyright of the data, and offers alternative phrasing for the above quoted portion: "The department may not assert copyright ownership to deny members of the public their right "to inspect and copy public government data at reasonable times and places" under Minn. Stat. § 13.03, subd. 3 (1994)."

I've glossed over most of the details, and my above explanation is intentionally simplified, but that's the gist of it. VernoWhitney (talk) 00:40, 6 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete Minnesota law apparently gave a particular official the right to interpret copyrightability arguments, but also gave another official the right to override those decisions. The first official did make a declaration that public record material was not governed by copyright, but that second official then issued an opinion which overrode the first one and explicitly said such works were still subject to state copyright, as copyright is more expansive then the rights conferred by public record law, and so not all copyright-related rights were obscured. So, Minnesota is the same as our usual assumption on other states -- material is copyrighted, and the original (valid) reason for the template was voided. The Commons template talk page had the explicit history and links but that appears to have been deleted along with the template unfortunately. Carl Lindberg (talk) 18:53, 11 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the template's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.