Venezuela

Article 325 of the Labor Law of May 7, 2012 says that intellectual products made under public sector employment, or financed with public funds, are public domain, while the authors keep the right to be credited. Commons adds Article 59 of the 1993 copyright law, which presumes that works made in employment or on commission pass to the employer, and infers that the state first held its employees' copyrights and then released them in 2012.¹ Commons applies this to stamps because IPOSTEL, which issues them, is a government regulatory organization, and covers them with its license tag for Venezuelan government works.¹² Its stamp note sets no date limit.

Venezuela's first stamps were issued on January 1, 1859 and were printed in the United States. From 1830 the post was run by a national directorate under government ministries, and IPOSTEL took over after it was founded in 1978.³ It became an autonomous institute by a law published on January 28, 1978.⁴ Some Venezuelan stamps were printed abroad, by firms such as the American Bank Note Company of New York and Waterlow & Sons of London.³ Commons' stamp note names IPOSTEL and does not discuss stamps issued before 1978 or the part played by outside printers. The Labor Law also covers work financed with public funds, but Commons does not apply that clause to stamps by name.¹ The archive applies the rule to every date, so for the earlier issues it rests on the archive's own reading.