[Foundation-l] Foundation's position on non-free images

Wed Aug 16 22:35:48 UTC 2006

On 8/16/06, Tisza Gergő <tgergo at inf.elte.hu> wrote:
I cannot speak for the foundation but I deal with copyright stuff
rather a lot on en and from time to time other wikis

> 1) Which copyright law should be followed? The Hungarian law, the law of
> the United States or both? (And what about France and the Netherlands,
> where IIRC some of the Wikimedia servers are hosted?) This is an
> important question, as Hungarian copyright law is a lot more restrictive
> (there is no fair use, and works made by the government remain
> copyyrighted).
>
United States law must be followed. Following other more restrictive
laws appears to be the choice of individual project (the works made by
the goverment thing is a red herring works made by the US goverement
are still PD and works made by almost any other goverment are not).

> 2) What are the rules, if any, for non-free images? Should we follow
> [[Wikipedia:Fair_use#Policy]], or is every community free to create its
> own policies about non-copyleft media content?
>

As long as the policy stays within US law it appears communities are
free to do what they like. That said the foundation retains the right
to remove any image at any time.

> 3) Is it acceptable to use, in a way similar to fair use, images which
> are illegal in the strict sense, but safe to use?

As far as US law goes no. Outside that I think the choice reverts to
the indivdual project

-- 
geni