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Message: 4
Date: Mon, 9 Jul 2012 10:42:25 +0100
From: Adam Cuerden <cuerden(a)gmail.com>
To: commons-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Subject: Re: [Commons-l] Moving forwards (Was "Does Commons have a
policy of violating UK copyright?")
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PndjUr6+KcB7ws9GQ32-+TMww(a)mail.gmail.com>
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So, Cary, the end of discussion is that Commons *does* have a policy
of violating UK copyright?
Seriously?
That's a rather provocative and over simplistic way of putting it. The
servers are in the US so any upload anywhere in the world has to comply
with US law. Individual editors are personally responsible for their
actions being compliant with the law where they upload images and where
they take photos; These could be very different legal jurisdictions. Any of
our users worldwide should be confident that the images which we hold
comply with US law; If they have stricter laws in their country then that
is between them and the law where they live. We could try to do things very
differently:
1. We could relocate Wikimedia Commons from the US to UK so that UK not
US copyright was the relevant law.
2. We could adopt a policy of trying to comply with multiple sometimes
conflicting copyright laws, and only hosting it in Commons if it complied
with some complex hybrid set of rules that included the laws of Afghanistan
Zimbabwe and a couple of hundred others.
3. We could give up on this globalisation fad and have a separate
Commons in each legal jurisdiction which only had to comply with that
country's laws and was only usable in that country.
Somehow I can't see any of those options getting consensus on commons, and
the latter two wouldn't work very smoothly either.
WSC