I ditched Maxmind
23, 25 and
International copyright legislation
Many countries apply a seventy year copyright term. That means seventy years after the author died, the copyright will expire at the start of the next year. Clear and simple.
However in March 2020 I discovered that some countries, notably the United States of America, have special rules for posthumous works. If I interpret the rather complicated rules correctly, a work probably written between 1902 and 1905, by Fernando Pessoa who died in 1935, but first published in 1988, will remain under copyright protection in the USA until 2047! In 2020 I wrote about this in Interlingua.
Publishing a derived work of a protected work, such as a translation, requires permission, which I don’t have. So my cautious conclusion, not being a lawyer, was that publishing my 2018 translation into Interlingua of Pessoa’s A hora do diabo in the USA would be illegal. Offering it on a webpage is a form of publication.
Therefore I no longer directly offer the page as an HTML file, but I put a CGI program in between. That program takes the IP address of the website visitor, and derives an ISO 3166 from it. If that code is US, CA (Canada), GB (Great Britain and Northern Ireland), IM (Isle of Man) or (added 25 November 2025) UK (United Kingdom), I don’t show the page with the original and translation side-by-side, but an explanatory text instead.
I included the extra countries, in addition to the USA, because some of the legislation is very complicated, and impossible to interpret with certainty for me as a non-lawyer. There, to stay on the safe side, I don’t display the page to visitors from those countries.
Software
This worked well for years. I used functions from a library supplied by Maxmind.com, which consults a downloadable database from that same company.
However, when recently I felt the need to reinstall my website on a fresh VPS (Virtual Private Server), I noticed that the database hadn’t been downloaded. As a result, when consulting A hora do diabo / Le hora del diabolo the server displayed an error message.
I inspected the database on the old VPS (then still available), and noticed the date: 2 April 2024. So it seems the monthly database update (by downloading a complete, new, compressed database) has not succeeded in over a year? I should have noticed, but I hadn’t.
So when I had time (very busy period lately) I tried to fix the problem, tried the commands in the shellscript I use for it, and several other variants suggested to me on Maxmind.com’s site, after logging in there with the account I still have. Unfortunately, nothing worked. I got an error message, or just an empty file, whatever I did. I created a fresh key. To no avail.
After a while I got fed-up with it. I’m still saying this is Maxmind’s fault, no doubt _I_ keep making a mistake somewhere. But I just couldn’t find it. I wondered if there wasn’t a simpler solution. So I decided to ask grok.com. Not because it always has everything right. It hasn’t. But it seems to be better at Information Technology issues than in other fields.
Grok.com came up with five online commands, all using curl.
curl
..@?
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