On 12/5/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Whatever legal system the rest of en Wikipedia
operates under -
presumably US law.
Assumeing you mean what legal system wikipedai puts the most effort
into following then yes that would be US law when it comes to
copyright.
We're talking about publicity shots aren't we?
You didn't state that in your example.
As in, photos that are
provided to the media so they can write puff pieces about
them...presumably the publicist owns the copyright, and presumably it
is legal for the media to use them this way. So presumably also legal
for Wikipedia to use them as the lead image for relevant articles. But
possibly not legal for downstream Wikipedia content reusers...
Also may not be legal to edit the images which pesents problems. Would
need to see the exact terms of the release though.
The interesting issue though is that we probably have
permission to
use these types of images without resorting to "fair use", but we
actually prohibit ourselves from using that kind of image: we accept
free images, we accept fair use...but not "permission granted for
Wikipedia". It's a strange one.
Very stong fair use cases could potentialy be the equiverlent of free.
I guess "we can use" is a self-imposed
limitation that doesn't have
much to do with the law.
It has a fair bit to do with the law since the problems verious
restictions (or strangely the lack of them) can cause are part of the
reason we try to avoid them.
--
geni