[Commons-l] An idea to help solve Commons copyright woes

Sun Jun 11 10:56:09 UTC 2006

Brianna Laugher wrote:

> Therefore I propose that we (Commons community) ask the Legal
> department to create and fill a permanent position known as something
> like "Commons liaison officer" (CLO). Their job will be to mediate
> requests for copyright advice between Commons and the juriwiki mailing
> list/Legal department. Hopefully we could have a turn-around of about
> two weeks on any given issue.
> 
> I hope this would be considered appropriate for the Legal department,
> because Commons is handling the vast bulk of media copyright issues,
> unlike text copyright issues which are spread almost everywhere else.

This would significantly blur the line between the Foundation and the 
community, and (for the obvious reasons) almost certainly make the 
Foundation legally liable for copyright violations without anything like 
the elasticity that we currently enjoy. I would strongly counsel against 
it, but then I'm sure the legal group is aware of the issues anyway.

Yours sincerely,
--
James D. Forrester
Wikimedia : [[W:en:User:Jdforrester|James F.]]
E-Mail    : james at jdforrester.org
IM (MSN)  : jamesdforrester at hotmail.com