Jastrow wrote:
The German Wikipedia has a {{Bild-PD-alt-100}}
template which states
something like "the period of protection for this work has likely
expired according to the provisions of German law and therefore is
considered as PD". See
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorlage:Bild-PD-alt-100
Pictures older than 150 years seem to be automatically tagged as PD-old.
This was the basis for my proposal from 2006, and it was rejected for commons,
and probably rightly so. 150 years might be reasonable, though if something was
recently published for the first time, that may mean an even longer copyright
period in some countries (including the US).
What bother me most is the de facto tolerance for
pictures of fairly
recent French buildings, for which the French law has no similar
exception. See for instance pictures of buidings by Jean Nouvel
(Institut du Monde arabe and so on). It's true we also have loads of
pictures of copyrighted outdoor artworks taken in countries where
freedom of panorama does not apply.
And they should all be deleted, IMHO. We have done this before several times for
the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre Pyramid and the Atomium. I don't know how french
law deals with "ordinary" buildings though.
-- Daniel