On Sun, Mar 2, 2014 at 8:50 PM, Chris McKenna <cmckenna(a)sucs.org> wrote:
You've missed the point. Commons is not at present a reliable source of
media, Free or otherwise, because media gets deleted because once someone
alleges that it is not free it gets deleted if the original uploader cannot
prove it is free, regardless of the merits of the allegation.
That's an odd view of "the merits". The content should not really have been
uploaded to begin with if the uploader couldn't show it was free. Commons
has help desks to assist people who are unsure.
The Foundation has said "do not delete images
that *might* be unfree under
URAA unless there is a takedown notice" yet the images continue to be
deleted.
I would take that complaint more seriously if people had identified
deletions where the URAA status was not entirely clear, and complained
about them. Instead the current proposal is that *all* URAA-related
deletions would be overturned.
The Foundation has not changed its position (expressed two years ago) that
images which are clearly unfree under URAA should be deleted.
This is entirely irrelevant to the attitude at Commons. English Wikipedia
>> is Free according to the definition it uses,
which is essentally "Free for
>> practical purposes as an Encyclopaedia" and that is applied reliably. In
>> contrast, Commons is arbitrarily and inconsistently Free and appears to be
>> prioritising point making over being a practical media repository. You are
>> free to disagree about en.wp's choices, but this does not excuse the
>> attitude of Commons to the Wikimedia community.
>>
>
Modify that to "Free for practical purposes *in the USA* as an
Encyclopaedia", and you're getting closer. Commons should have a broader
goal than that, though.
Getting back to URAA-affected images, [[en:Template:Not-PD-US-URAA]] places
images in [[en:Category:Works copyrighted in the United States]], which
says "we are currently trying to figure out what to do with files like this
one." It's more than two years since Golan vs Holder, which seems a long
time to be figuring this out.
That's fair enough in a way, since image hosting probably shouldn't be high
on enwiki's list of priorities. But contrast that with Commons, where the
essential decisions regarding URAA were made (based partly on WMF Legal
input) within 6 months or so, and substantial progress has been made
towards implementing them, despite the much larger scale of the problem
there (several thousand images, compared to 127 in [[en:Category:Works
copyrighted in the United States]]).