[Foundation-l] Help requested on Commons copyright woes

Sun Jul 23 05:18:38 UTC 2006

On 22/07/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> WMF would probably do best to distance itself from these issues.  It has
> too much to lose from a wrong decision.  The fundamental premise should
> be that the uploader of material has the primary responsibility for
> establishing the copyright status of what he provides.  At the same time
> it needs to safeguard its founding principle that it is providing an
> free access resource.  I certainly have ideas for attempting to
> reconcile these concepts, but I'll save them for another time.

Well, the thing is, a huge part of Commons' role is to play Media
Copyright Police. And as this thread has shown it is really, really,
hard. The same issues keep coming up again and again, no satisfactory
results, it's like arguing with windmills. Having the same debates
again and again is very weary-making. It's easy enough to upload at
Commons then forget about it, but each project is only as strong as
its weakest link, and then it comes to copyright, that could well be
Commons. So this thread is me asking for help. Is it not the WMF's
role to support and help its projects?

Regards,
Brianna