[Foundation-l] Re: Copyright issues...walking on thin ice

Wed Aug 11 14:56:02 UTC 2004

Well, I'm glad the copyright issues have been cleared up. Thank you everyone for your responses.
Is any work being done to allow the tagging of images as copyrighted or GFDL? I would like to see this happen before we have millions of copyrighted images on wikipedia. Otherwise, it could be a lot more work trying to find the copyrighted images to tag them. It concerns me that some of our free (as in freedom, not beer) content is dependent on non-free content. However, if we can draw a clear line between copyrighted and GFDL content on the database side of things, I think this will help keep the free and non-free content separate, allowing anyone to use our free content freely, without a risk of accidentally including non-free content.

On Wed, 11 Aug 2004 12:07:14 +0200, Yann Forget <yann at forget-me.net> wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Le Wednesday 11 August 2004 08:49, Michael Snow a écrit :
> 
> (...)
> > But online content is not that big of an issue really, because anyone
> > who says we're infringing on their copyright has to give us a takedown
> > notice first, and we can remove the offending image. The real problem is
> > print. And once you get to print, I have a _very_ hard time buying any
> > argument that the image which illustrates an article is somehow a
> > separate and independent work from the article text. The one kind of
> > print version for which I might entertain this argument is if the images
> > are segregated as is done in many books, on separate glossier facing
> > pages or in a batch of illustrations in the middle of the book. But in
> > the routine print version, where the image is printed out on the same
> > page as the article, they look like part of one document and I don't see
> > how you can make much of a case that they're not. As a result, I think
> > the article as a whole, _including_ associated images, is the smallest
> > Document to which we can legitimately atomize the GFDL.
> 
> I would agree with you on the interpretation of the GFDL, but I think that the
> online and paper projects have to be treated differently.
> Some people even say that the WMF should never publish a paper edition on its
> own, and they may have some good points, but IANAL.
> 
> Anyway, I think it's the responsibility of the publisher of the paper edition
> to remove fair use images. So it is important that images are clearly tagged,
> so they can be easily removed with a simple SQL query.
> 
> And I can imagine another scenario where an organisation could buy the rights
> of copyrighted images to include them in a paper edition. But I can't say if
> this would be valid under the GFDL.
> 
> > --Michael Snow
> 
> Yann
> 
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Michael Becker