[WikiEN-l] Common sense exceptions to our copyright policy.

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 7/29/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> I hate to spoil your fun, but what is going to stop people from just
> claiming "Yes, I made this" on every random image they get from
> Flickr/Photobucket/Google images?

It is pretty clear that our copyvios come because strangers to our
project don't know any better... It was free for them to obtain from
some site, so they can't see a reason we can't have the picture too.

Unfortunately it seems that when the site tells them no (as happens
with the prohibited options in the drop down, a great many people have
no reservations lying to the site in order to get it to not say their
images will be deleted. :(   I don't think this is because people are
dishonest at heart, but rather because people are conditioned to press
buttons until the computer does whatever they want.

That said, I think "saying no" would cause a real reduction in bad
images... but if we aren't careful how we say no we will encourage
people to twiddle the knobs until they've left misleading metadata.
I'd rather we have more violations which are tagged somewhat correctly
than fewer violations but with them tagged as free content.