[WikiEN-l] Creation of user photographs

Sun May 21 23:43:03 UTC 2006

On 5/21/06, Peter Mackay <peter.mackay at bigpond.com> wrote:
> You seem to be saying it's OK to break the law if you can get away with it,
> but I think you misunderstand my point.

I'm not saying that at all. Whether or not something actually breaks
the law in copyright issues is never clear cut. What I'm saying we do
is go with the good-faith assumption that in these cases the users
have the ability to set the license of the photo, and are willing to
take the legal flack if it turns out they gave us false information
about it. I'm also saying that the risk of this being a problem is so
low as to be basically nonexistant.

> I agree that these photographs are (mostly) non-controversial. But what is
> the absolutely correct way of uploading them so we can use them with *zero*
> risk of being sued?

There is no way to have zero risk of being sued. But I think in cases
like this, the chances of being sued are so low as to not warrant a
separate policy.

If we have real concerns about individual pictures being mis-licensed,
we can contact the user who uploaded it as usual. When it is clearly a
picture which originates from the user his- or herself, and is not
something which appears to be high-risk (I consider a snapshot of a
non-famous person in a not-interesting context to be pretty low risk),
and there is no way to know whether or not the user "truly" has the
legalities of it spelled out in hard ink, I say we assume that it is
unlikely to be a problem. Certainly not something worth splitting
legal hairs over, in my opinion.

> Jimbo seems to have gone about it by obeying the rules. Perhaps we should
> emulate his example?

Sure, emulate him, go ahead, it can't hurt. But we don't need a new
policy about it.

FF