Carcharoth wrote:
It is an interesting point that being hardline about
copyright puts
pressure on some organisations and governments to reconsider their
laws and regulations. But there is an element where Commons (and to a
lesser extent Wikipedia) is seen as acting like the copyright police,
overextending and throwing out (for lack of information) pictures that
may well be public domain. The solution there is to knuckle down and
find that missing information, or help people find that information.
Too often, though, I've come across an attitude of "well, you can't
prove it is public domain, so delete". That is a cautious and safe
attitude to take, but it is not an attitude that actually helps when
trying to identify and free up new image sources.
OTOH it can be defended as an attitude of scholarly type. We want to
know where our information comes from. We should be concerned about the
provenance of historical images, also. It is now so easy to fake images
in certain ways (as I hardly need tell you) that a degree of care in
asking for background is going to pay off.
Charles