Magnus Manske wrote:
1. People who upload their own work at the
commons obviously want them
to be realeased under a free license (otherwise, they'd go to flicker or
something)
2. As they didn't chose a license, they either didn't know they have to,
and/or don't care about these "legal technicalities"
3. In order to grant their obvious wish to release these images under a
free license, we add GFDL and CC-BY-SA-2.5 to all of these images
4. We leave {{OwnWork}} and change it into a notice that the license
information below is assumed, and if the author doesn't agree, (s)he
should write a note on the talk page or fix it directly
5. Where the author is easily reachable, leave them a note what we did
I am on a train right now, and so I can't see what the {{OwnWork}}
template says, but in general making any sort of assumption about what a
user might have meant, with respect to licensing, is a very dangerous
idea. This should be doubly true for commons, which tries to be the
gold standard for freely licensed images, and which can not rely on
"fair use" rationales in the same way that some-language Wikipedia
currently do.
I am not claiming "fair use", I'm trying to back up the user's
intention
(release under a fair license) with a concrete implementation (GFDL).
Basically, we have three options:
* Find the user who uploaded the image and make him/her chose a license
(great!)
* User can't be found, assuming good faith and calling it GFDL
* User can't be found, assuming nothing and deleting the image
Magnus