[Foundation-l] [Commons-l] PD-art and official "position of the WMF"

Tue Aug 26 07:57:44 UTC 2008

On Tue, Aug 26, 2008 at 12:13 AM, Cary Bass <cary a wikimedia.org> wrote:

>
> I've noticed that Italian Wikipedia contains a rather large number of
> cc-by-nd, cc-by-nc and various different combinations thereof images
> like that[1].  I was not aware of any moment when the Foundation told
> it.wp it wasn't trusted to preserve WMF values, and feel secure that if
> this took place after the EDP policy went into effect then I would have
> heard something about it...can you source that?
> - --
>
Just to explain, the Italian law does not admit fair use, so the EDP of
it.wp requires that the non-free images (those which qualify for fairuse in
the licensing policy) need a permission for their use on it.wp (a
not-free-enough cc counts as a permission). Others may have a double
license, such as public domain in Italy (non-artistic photos become PD in
Italy after 20 years - but they are not accepted on commons). So, yes, we
changed our policy, we deleted a lot of stuff, some members of the community
were pissed off by the resolution, but nonetheless we complied.

Regarding the take-down notice, if I remember it was 2 years ago. We managed
to make the news know of it, and some proposal of law changes introducing a
kind of fair use were made (then afaik the Government fell and it all got
stuck).

The point is: there are a lot of things in Italy that have restrictions on
their use that are not related to copyright, and commons/the WMF only speak
copyright, so we get the contradiction of having something which is free
(from copyright) but that still requires permission to be used. And of
course when you ask the WMF for legal advice, the answer is see it by
yourselves (I perfectly understand the reasons - such as mixing of copyright
laws of different countries is too complicated to give a precise answer).
Cruccone