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

Thu Aug 17 15:28:26 UTC 2006

On 8/16/06, Erik Moeller <eloquence at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'll state for the record my disagreement with that. I think copyright
> policy should be made on the Foundation level in cooperation with the
> projects. The current situation is an unsustainable mess.

Has the foundation not set the policy? If not carved on stone tablets
then through the actions of those on its board and in its employ.

1) Thou shall not upload content which will place the foundation in legal peril.
2) Wikimedia projects are Free Content.

These decisions leave a lot of grey area which must be navigated by
the projects, true, but that is really a fact of life. Copyright, and
especially international copyright, are not clear black and white
matters which can be easily codified in a policy document.

Because the WMF merely provides a forum and some fertilizer for
community of people around the world to come together and create
perpetually free educational content, we really can't expect it to
step in and make decisions over every image.  Not only would it not
scale, but it would fundamentally change the nature of the foundation
from providing infrastructure and support for a charitable purpose to,
effectively, authoring and controlling the authoring of the content
itself.

On enwiki the issue is currently 'solved' in the sense that the people
working on it are consistently and reliably doing the right thing.
We're still buried under a pile of bad decisions made in the past and
we're still challenged by the constant influx of new problem
content... but at least we are soundly moving in the right direction.
 Given time enwiki will be completely straightened out... the bigger
question is how to develop a culture and a community of folks
addressing these issues on other problems.