On 11/25/05, Justin Cormack <justin(a)specialbusservice.com> wrote:
On Fri, 2005-11-25 at 15:19 +0100, Uwe Brauer wrote:
Hello
I just found the following image
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:RFJesus.jpg
which seems to be under a different sort of license, if I am not
mistaken.
I would like to include that image, in the corresponding German
wikipedia article, however so far people hesitated since they believe
that this license as expressed in the above url, would/could violate
the GDL. I find it odd that different wikipedias have different
standards concerning the license politics.
What can be done? May the simplest solution would be to contact the
artist (if he/she can be find) and ask for explicit permission.
Any comments, suggestions?
This is typical of en-w's "flexible" approach to licensing.
Someone is pretending that because it was printed in some
newspapers under terms that we know nothing about somehow this
gives us permission to use it under some unknown terms even though
we dont accept pictures where we are explicitly given permission
any more.
Currently its not worth trying to get rid of these pictures from en
as there are still thousands of more dubious ones (no source for
example). It might get picked up at some point in the fair use
examination.
You cant use it in de: only real free images, sensible policy.
Justinc
Is this really how it works in the German Wikipedia (and other
non-English Wikipedias)? I assume you must allow some form of fair
dealing, as it's difficult to think of a photo of the real world that
doesn't contain *some* copyrighted materials incidently. Does the
German Wikipedia have many pictures of celebrities and big events? Do
you find that not allowing non-free images detracts significantly from
the encyclopedia (ignoring, if you can, the benefits of the images
being free)?
I think a big part of the hesitation of really embracing being a free
encyclopedia is the fear that the encyclopedia would be so much less
useful without fair use images. I guess I can get a rough idea of the
answers to these questions just browsing the sites on my own, and
maybe looking at some statistics if I can find them, but it'd be nice
to hear from the perspective of someone who really spends a lot of
time on those Wikipedias.
Anthony