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

Fri Aug 18 03:08:25 UTC 2006

On 8/17/06, valdelli at bluemail.ch <valdelli at bluemail.ch> wrote:
> If you upload images in Commons you follow rules established for
> Commons and used in any countries. If you upload images in Hungarian
> Wikipedia you use hungarian law and these images could be used only
> for hungarian side of Wikipedia.

Unfortunately, that's not at all how it works.  The Hungarian
Wikipedia is not even remotely tied to the nation of Hungary, and
likewise for the many languages of our various projects.  You may as
well say that the Italian Wikipedia follows the laws of Italy,
although as a Swiss contributor you should know better.

The operative laws are those of the United States and of the nations
of the individual contributors involved, along with those of anyone
who might use the resulting material.  Currently, projects (and even
individual languages of those projects) are allowed to set their own
copyright policies, and while the trouble arising from that has thus
far amounted to a relative nuisance, the issue is something that
should be discussed and—fingers crossed—resolved very soon.

This is not to say that I expect it will happen, but at least it's
being discussed.

Austin