SlimVirgin wrote: The fact is that copyright issues have been a perpetual topic of debate throughout my eight years of participation. It all gets caught up in the confusion of the policy making process. That process tends to be too adversarial, sometimes with too little practical understanding of legal realities. At some point someone has to be trusted and respected enough to say "These are our limits," and have it stick. This is a big challenge that extends well beyond the narrow topic of copyrights. This is more about the elusive qualities of leadership. As a society we have all been disillusioned by the actions of those in power at any and all levels. Our era of rapid communications has made those actions more difficult to hide. We find ourselves unable to trust anyone. At the same time most find it difficult to function without leadership, and crave the certainties which that leadership brings. Ec

Durova wrote: With due respect toward Ray's very thoughtful analysis, I can't agree with that conclusion. Wikimedia Commons currently has 276 administrators and over 6 million images. Compare that against en:wiki's 1,714 administrators and 3 million articles and you'll get an idea how thinly things are spread. Commons has a serious deletion request backlog. Experienced contributors--particularly at the featured content level--have an obligation to set the example and put the best foot forward. Yes, it can be frustrating to research copyright. It would be considerably more frustrating if a copyright owner who didn't thank us for the appropriation complained to the press. About two years ago the featured picture program had an editor who was nominating copyright violations and running a vote stacking sockfarm. He had actually gotten a copyvio promoted to featured picture before we realized it; fortunately we caught onto the problem before it ran on the main page. Afterward a single administrator undid his siteban without discussion. Last fall he was banned again when he actually threatened another editor. During the noticeboard thread it turned out that he had gone over to the DYK program and had resumed submitting copyvios there--which apparently site culture was not doctrinaire enough about addressing. If a fellow who had already been sitebanned for copyvio can return and continue copyvios for a year at a venue which runs on the main page, then perhaps a more doctrinaire approach is exactly what we need. -Lise These are important consequences, but mostly begin to stray from the real issue. Yes, lack of good administrators is a big problem, but the policies that they administer would remain the same without regard to the number of administrators. A simpler formulation of the rules could ease the administrators' burdens. Alternatively, the solution is more administrators. I agree that experienced contributors need to set an example, but that too is within the rules as defined. Thus they too suffer from a lack of clear definition. I don't see complaints to the press as a big cause for worry. Remember that we are dealing with works whose copyright status is debatable, and not just last year's pop trivia whose rights are very clear. If we rediscover something that hasn't seen the light of day for fifty years, the owner's beginning his complaints with the press would ring a little hollow if in all those fifty years he took no other steps to protect those rights. The story of the badly-behaved editor doesn't help us either. What we do about such behaviour is about the application of policy, not about determining what that copyright policy in fact is. I would even venture to guess that the individual in question would have as enthusiastically violated a liberal copyright policy as a stringent one. I'm sorry if my use of the word "doctrinaire" misled you in that direction. I was really referring to deciding the edge cases where the existence of a valid copyright is debatable. Ec

On 10 February 2010 02:58, Durova <nadezhda.durova(a)gmail.com> wrote: I've sometimes thought that, in an ideal world, we should just phase out PD-old and all its forms - it's often, as you say, wishful thinking, or sometimes (and I know in my early days I did this) a cover for a misunderstanding about just what the thresholds are. So what'd we replace it with? Something functionally like... {{copyright |date=1895 |location=Germany |author=anonymous }} ...and have it then spit out, well, "this image is free under German copyright law (sect. 473 ii) and in the United States (Title 15, 7)" or the like, with an option to click to have it generate a copyright status in Canada or France or where have you. We do *have* this data for a sizable proportion of our images, after all, and it's a bit lazy when we take all this and slap a "well, PD, I guess" rubber-stamp on it! I doubt this is *practical* in the near term, of course, but it's a thought. Any other ideas? -- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk

On Wed, Feb 10, 2010 at 1:26 PM, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: The great thing about it, is that it encourages people to go to their sources and find out what they *really* know about an image and its origins and provenance, rather than just guessing and being an armchair copyright lawyer. If you can find out something definite about an image, and source it, then that is good. Though what to do with "circa" dates, I'm not sure. Carcharoth

On 07/02/2010, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote: My understanding is that the Wikipedia doesn't really have any risk under the law. Provided the strictures of the DMCA are followed, any uploaded copyrighted material simply has to be removed promptly if they receive a copyright violation notice. If the strictures of the DMCA aren't followed then the Wikipedia/media could be in big trouble. -- -Ian Woollard

On Sun, Feb 7, 2010 at 4:28 PM, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: The reality of the situation for reusers is that they are unlikely to be held liable for significant damages if they have plausible reason to believe they were using the image legally, and react appropriately if the owner informs them differently. It is practically impossible to in the legal sense prove the provenance of images you didn't produce yourself, as a reuser. Everyone assumes the bundled provenance is accurate, or at least not fraudulent. The systems in the US and elsewhere protect those who rely on provenance they have available. That does not mean we shouldn't pay attention to the problem. But we shouldn't let it cripple us. Wikipedia's policy of generally being stricter (in policy, and enforcement) than legal requirements in the US should help protect us and our downstreams. We should not get lazy and rely on that, but we also should not be too defensive or paranoid. -- -george william herbert george.herbert(a)gmail.com

On Mon, Feb 8, 2010 at 2:05 AM, SlimVirgin <slimvirgin(a)gmail.com> wrote: Possibly the reusers who stick images on T-shirts and mugs and sell them? Carcharoth

On Mon, Feb 8, 2010 at 2:37 PM, SlimVirgin <slimvirgin(a)gmail.com> wrote: I believe the answer is serious in as much as the most contested (but allowed) re-use-cases of Commons content are for commercial purposes. It is a use-case that is both difficult to explain to many copyright holders but also important for us to retain as a standard for our free-culture project. I agree that it is annoying to think of commons admins going to all this trouble just for the benefit of unknown people selling t-shirts, but if people *aren't* allowed to sell t-shirts then it's not free-culture project. For the record, I agree with George Herbert (above): "We should not get lazy and rely on [legal requirements in the US], but we also should not be too defensive or paranoid." As they say about Fair Use - use it or lose it! -Liam [[witty lama]]

On Mon, Feb 8, 2010 at 5:33 AM, Anthony <wikimail(a)inbox.org> wrote: Really, to give the context, you need to quote it in full: "The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally. In collaboration with a network of chapters, the Foundation provides the essential infrastructure and an organizational framework for the support and development of multilingual wiki projects and other endeavors which serve this mission. The Foundation will make and keep useful information from its projects available on the Internet free of charge, in perpetuity." I agree that the "educational content" and "free license or in the public domain" aspects do often conflict, but both aspects need to be borne in mind when debating such cases. Carcharoth

On Thu, 11 Feb 2010, SlimVirgin wrote: If one of the victims was here now, and he took the picture, he could grant a free license and we could use it. Anyway, I don't think there's as much a separation between this and our fair use image policy as you seem to think (not in this message, in previous ones). It's the *very same* attitude that creates a ridiculous fair use policy which also creates a ridiculous no-proof-it's-PD policy.

On Sun, 7 Feb 2010, SlimVirgin wrote: The thing is, "there might be a free equivalent somewhere" isn't really an *argument*. It's an officially blessed excuse, officially blessed to such an extent that it's impossible to argue "well, I don't think there's a free equivalent somewhere" because even a ridiculously low chance of a free equivalent existing somewhere ias enough to count as "there might be", and there is no allowance made for "well, there might be, but the chance is so small that there may as well not be". This is also a particular problem with pictures of living people, since we've been told that since it's *possible* to take another picture of a living person, all non-free images of living people are prohibited. The official way of interpreting "it's possible to" takes no consideration of just how possible it is. In any other context this would be considered rules-lawyering-- we're basically officially rules-lawyering our own policies.

On Mon, Feb 8, 2010 at 17:22, Michael Peel <email(a)mikepeel.net> wrote: Or we could simply make a decision as a project to respect the copyrights and the terms of release of the countries of origin. I'm dealing with an image at the moment of Palestinian women refugees resting after being expelled from their homes as the Israeli army approached in 1948. It's in the public domain in Israel, which now controls the area in which the image was taken. I am 99.9 percent certain it was taken by an employee of the British War Office, which would make it public domain in Britain and the Commonwealth (and as far as the British are concerned that makes it PD everywhere). I sent off for an old first edition of a book I knew it had appeared in in the 1950s in the hope that it would explicitly credit the War Office, but sadly it doesn't. Because of that small doubt, I have to claim fair use. And because I am claiming fair use, someone has said I will have to reduce the quality of the image for it to comply with our fair-use policy. It's insane.

On Tue, Feb 9, 2010 at 10:59, Cary Bass <cary(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: Hi Cary, most of the image people I've checked with say that images on the Commons are supposed to be PD in their country of origin *and* in the U.S. Although there are images on the Commons that are PD in their country of origin but *not* in the U.S., they usually carry a tag that places the PD status in doubt and may be proposed for deletion. This means we can't use them on WP. Look at this image for example. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Refugees_from_Lydda.jpg Palestinian refugees in the British Mandate of Palestine during the exodus from their homes after Israeli troops moved in, July 1948, photographer unknown, believed to be from, or working on behalf of, the British War Office. First publication date not known, but I do know it had been published by 1957. It's PD in Israel, which now governs part of that land. It's PD in Jordan, which governs the other part. 99.9 percent certain it's PD in the UK, which governed the land at the time. But not clearly PD in the U.S. It has therefore been proposed for deletion from the Commons. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Refugees_from_Lydda.jpg To use it on WP, I have to claim fair use, which means I'm expected to deliberately reduce its quality. :) Here is an official British War Office image from the 1940s, definitely taken before 1951. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:King_Abdullah_of_Jordan_and_John_Glubb_Ba… David Gerard got the British govt to confirm years ago that these are regarded as PD worldwide. But not clearly PD in the U.S. because of the January 1, 1996 rule; therefore we can't upload to Commons (safely) and can't use in featured articles (safely). The above are no means isolated examples. It seems to me that when we find situations like this cropping up again and again, we have evidence of *reductio ad absurdum*, evidence that the image policies are irrational, and way too complex to expect editors to adhere to. All our content and behavioral policies have to watch out for this -- if we find a content policy is trying to force people to do things that everyone agrees are silly, we change the policy. But with the image policies, no matter the tangles we end up in, no matter that we're basically telling every country in the world that they're not allowed to order their own affairs, and no matter that there are no real legal issues in the U.S. with images of this kind anyway, no sensible change in the image policies is permitted. That's what confuses me. Is it just that no one is bothering to sort them out, or is there resistance to it somewhere? Is it Foundation-level, or what is it? Sarah

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Cary Bass wrote: Or does this fall under that crazy 1996 law... - -- Cary Bass Volunteer Coordinator, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate

David Gerard wrote: I sometimes wonder whether reusability is the rope with which the free-culture movement hangs itself. Ec