On Tue, Jun 17, 2014 at 8:58 AM, Pete Forsyth <peteforsyth(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Can you clarify -- who do you intend by "we"? If your answer is "English
Wikipedia," I think we already have a somewhat workable solution to this
complex problem: fair use is permitted in certain cases.[2] Of course, you
probably mean something broader. But the solution English Wikipedia has
chosen is available, by virtue of a WMF resolution,[3] to every Wikimedia
project. So if fair use is the issue, why not simply propose permitting it
at specific local projects?
The whole point of Commons is to serve as a central repository of shared
images for Projects to use together. The same image on en.wikipedia and
ru.wikipedia and es.wikipedia and the dictionaries and books and travel
and...
The failure of Commons is that it's defaulting to a fuzzily defined highest
common denominator on licensing.
What we need here is another shared image repo which is defaulting to the
*lowest* common denominator on licensing. I.e., somewhere I can stick an
image which is fair usable on en.wikipedia and make it available to all the
other projects, even if it would fail Commons retention criteria.
It is in the combination of "the only common repository" and "highest
common denominator" that Commons fails. I have no problem with Commons
remaining as-is if we have an alternate lowest-common-denominator image
repo that will automatically be searched for images as Commons is now.
--
-george william herbert
george.herbert(a)gmail.com