[Commons-l] COA copyright policies and other legal stuff,..

Thu Jul 6 07:01:00 UTC 2006

Since Eric was posting a hint on all common admins talk pages I use
this opportunity to talk about a subject I strongly feel about.

BTW I am subscribing to this ML and have been since the beginning. The
reason I have not been reading the ML or making posts here is a
completly differnt one.

When I was trying to go through the deletion tags to dispose images
that are against the commons policy I found the following:

http://commons.wikimedia.org//wiki/Template%3ASlovakCityCOA

Concerning COAs my believe always was that we have to care about:

1) Copyright(, Urheberrecht,...) whatever it may be in your country
2) It must be commercial.
3) People must be able to modify it.

To 1) in most cases we do not need to care about that dealing with
COAs since they are ooooooooooold.
However the points 2) and 3) make me feel uneasy and I know there was
a long discussion on de WP.

Concerning point 2) some of you might know that the german newspaper
"Die Zeit" was using the COA of the federal state and city Hamburg and
needed to change the COA on the front cover because of a senat
decision in Hamburg. Personally I think that such a behaviour is
silly. I mean it is not like they have been printing toilet paper with
the COA of Hamburg and selling the stuff. Even printing the COA of a
town on t-shirts and selling them could cause legal trouble IMHO.

To 3) the Brockhaus Multimedial (a germen encyclopedia on DVD) uses
stylised COAs. I totally do not get why they did that. What I am
saying is that this could be interpreted as a modification plus
commercial use. Modifing a COA and selling the stuff on some
merchandising items could cause legal problems too IMHO.

Summary: I do not think that COA go 100% with wikimedia project
policies concerning points 2 and 3. Personally I even think that COAs
as a picture in an encyclopedia are nice to have but not necessary.
But since they seem accepted in the Wikimedia projects commons should
keep them all and without exception since they are PD with some legal
framework attached to them. Therfore I suggest that in cases like the
slovak COA we ignore the terms of use and leave it up to the one that
uses these images to read the terms of use. The slovak terms of use do
not even seem very strikt as far as I can understand the language.

Last but not least I think that the wikimedia projects had the wrong
approach dealing with COAs. They should IMHO have waived using them.
Only COAs that had 100% leagal permissions from the city/country
should have been used. While the WM-projects were growing there could
have been an open window to leagaly enforce WM-projects to use the
COAs because the cities would have wanted us to use them because
without saying the WM-projects make even the smallest town known in
the internet.

What do you think?

greetings

Paddy

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