Commons-l November 2007

commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org

54 participants
36 discussions

Tool idea: SVG easy-translate
by Brianna Laugher 09 Nov '07

09 Nov '07

- user inputs existing SVG diagram/map, and desired target language - tool extracts the text labels and shows them to the user, asking for the equivalent in target language (also shows existing SVG for context) (- tool previews new SVG?) - tool uploads new SVG with appropriate name and description etc, and links to first one Some of the tools mentioned in this blogpost may be useful: http://andy.brisgeek.com/archives/45 (same in Russian: http://www.linuxgraphics.ru/readarticle.php?article_id=33 ) thoughts? cheers, Brianna -- They've just been waiting in a mountain for the right moment: http://modernthings.org/

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Free (gratuit and libre) satellite/aerial imagery?
by Benjamin Esham 09 Nov '07

09 Nov '07

Hello all, Does anyone know of a source for satellite or aerial imagery released under a license suitable for Commons use? I'd like to create images of a couple of locations in the United States, but I haven't been able to find any suitable sources online. Thanks a lot! -- Benjamin D. Esham E-mail/Jabber: bdesham(a)gmail.com | AIM bdesham128 | PGP D676BB9A "Don't you think about anyone but yourself?!" "Of course I do... I just think about myself first." — Ishka and Quark, /Deep Space Nine/

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Let's move Commons to Antigua!
by David Gerard 09 Nov '07

09 Nov '07

http://www.igamingbusiness.com/article-detail.php?articleID=15231 http://africa.reuters.com/business/news/usnBAN324906.html - d.

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Professional photographers on Commons: sucess story
by Rama Rama 09 Nov '07

09 Nov '07

Greetings to everybody, On pfctdayelise's suggestion who's never afraid of rejoicing for something, I'd like to request a round of applause for Mikhail Evstafiev. Mikhail Evstafiev is a Russian artist, painter, writer and photographer. He has covered the wars in Bosnia and Chechnya (hint: these are dangerous places and recent periods before Wikipedia was born, two factors which usually make it difficult to gather images), and various political and cultural events. A while ago, Evstafiev was contacted to enquire whether he would agree to licence some of his photographs under Free licences. He did, and since then he has created an account and uploaded quite a few photographs himself. His work can be seen at : http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Mikhail_Evstafiev and his account is http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Evstafiev What should we do from there ? my suggestions: 1) On the moral aspect: Rejoice: there are really interesting people on Commons. 2) On the social aspect: Do our outmost so that people like Evstafiev feel at home on Commons and really become part of the family (Seek them on the Internet, ask them to join, explain how it is around here and how contributing to Commons is a symbiosis, provide technical support) 3) On the technical aspect: Watch this sort of images over and over and over again and learn how to compose photos that strong ourselves. Cheers ! -- Rama

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Waiving Canadian moral rights?
by Andy Kaplan-Myrth 08 Nov '07

08 Nov '07

Hi, I'm one of the Project Leads for Creative Commons Canada, and since this thread came to my attention I thought I would try to add some context. Padraic Ryan wrote: > Canada, apparently, may be > a unique jurisdiction in that it allows content creators to waive moral > rights. I would agree with geni that other common law jurisdictions are likely similar in that they allow moral rights to be waived to some degree. The situation is not as simple as this suggests, of course. While the Canadian Copyright Act says that moral rights "may be waived in whole or in part", there is disagreement as to whether they can be waived *in general*, or if waivers can only apply for particular uses of a work. For moral rights waivesrs to benefit the open community, they would need to be general waivers for all uses of the work. I should note that there are two categories of moral rights: the right to attribution, and the right to integrity. Since open licences like CC require attribution anyhow, that moral right is not an issue. When we talk about the possibility of waiving moral rights, we're only talking about the right of integrity -- I take it this is what Padraic meant. > Although this does seem to be a complex, unanswered, issue, I think we > should encourage Commons users creating Canadian works to waive these > rights. So here's the deal. In past years, when CC had no policy w.r.t. moral rights, each jurisdiction that had to deal with moral rights did their own thing. In Canada, the version 1.0 licence retained moral rights because we were trying to stay as close to the US CC licence as possible. In versions 2.0 and 2.5 of the Canadian CC licences, we waived the moral right of integrity. This choice was taken for just the reason Padraic is interested in here: some in the community feel that waiving moral rights is required in order for the licences to be libre. For the 3.0 Canada licences, we are following the CC policy for moral rights that resulted from extensive discussion. Given this policy and the issues around whether moral rights can be waived in general, the CC Canada 3.0 licences will keep the moral right of integrity intact. I would note that the Canadian 2.5 licences will still be out there once the 3.0 version is released, and Canadians who want to take their chances with waiving moral rights can still use the old versions. Cheers, Andy -- Andy Kaplan-Myrth, LL.B., M.A. Barrister & Solicitor Joint Project Lead, Creative Commons Canada ------------------------------------------------ email: andy(a)creativecommons.ca web: http://www.creativecommons.ca ------------------------------------------------ email: andy(a)kaplan-myrth.ca web: http://kaplan-myrth.ca ------------------------------------------------ PGP Key ID 0xE9349025 ------------------------------------------------

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Waiving Canadian moral rights?
by Padraic Ryan 07 Nov '07

07 Nov '07

If you're like me, ever since the Flickr-virgin case and the release of the 3.0 CC licenses, you've been curious about the relationship between free culture and "moral rights". After reading this post [ http://sciencecommons.org/weblog/archives/2007/11/07/cc-oa-moral-rights/], today, I learned something I didn't know before: Canada, apparently, may be a unique jurisdiction in that it allows content creators to waive moral rights. I'm not sure if there has ever been an official Wikimedia (or broader free culture) opinion on moral rights, but they seem antithetical to the cause - it allows the original creator to dictate conditions on reusers. Creative Commons seems to have washed their hands of this, but when it's possible, I don't think we should. At some point, I think we will also have to deal with the question of whether retaining moral rights (when not legally forced to) can be considered creating non-free content. Although this does seem to be a complex, unanswered, issue, I think we should encourage Commons users creating Canadian works to waive these rights. I've created a draft template at [[User:Padraic/Moralrights]], please take a look. Ideally, this kind of waiver could be included in the Canadian CC license templates as well. There is also the international legal question, although I have a legal newbie, it seems to me if moral rights are waived by the creator in the country of a work's creation, then other countries would have no obligation to continue to protect them. Thoughts? Padraic

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Re: [Commons-l] Are models works or arts ?
by Monahon, Peter B. 07 Nov '07

07 Nov '07

Philosophical problem here - any photographer has immediate copyright in even their own latent image. The original model is not being copied. The photographers is creating a new copyright work of their own authorship when the photographer makes a photograph. Photographers do not "take" anything, in this context, they "make" new copyright works of their own authorship at each click of their camera shutter release button! If a photographer were to put down their camera and construct a duplicate model ship, THAT might be copying the original model. Photographing is not copying, in this context. The premise below is wrong for non-flat (two dimensional) original works of art (art = artifact, not capital "A" "Art", meaning "expensive stuff in museums", not what we're talking about here). A photograph produces an essentially flat, two dimensional artifact, and therefore cannot reasonably be considered a "copy" of an other non-flat multi-dimensional original artifact, such as a model ship. Therefore, no photograph can be reasonably considered an infringement on whatever copyright the original non-flat artifact creator / owner may claim. Perhaps photocopying a flat two-dimensional artifact that is subject to another person's copyright is another situation, worthy of exploration in a separate thread. However, that being said, anyone can sue anyone, but that does not make them right. Anyone can also win a lawsuit, but that also does not make them right. Anyone can appeal that judgment, but that does not make them right. My advice to anyone is to do what you think is right, and then if someone sues you, decide how much you want to fight and win to protect your rights, and everyone else's rights. I do not think anyone else can tell you how much fight you have in you for this battle for photography and photographers to be equivalently, appropriately, and accurately respected by all for our free speech rights and copyrights. Let us know what you decide to do with your original photographic artifacts. It is very generous of you to consider contributing your own copyright artifacts to the commons. PS - And never forget the totally unrelated difference between '"making a photograph" and "publishing a photograph". Some people think that if they can successfully sue you for publishing a photograph, then they can also stop you from even making your own photograph in the first place, These are totally different and unrelated areas of law experience - "creating" versus "publishing". We do not have preventive laws, so we are free to make, and publish anything. But, we do have remedial laws, so if someone thinks your creating and publishing actions, after the fact, have deleteriously affected their own life, limb, or property, they may be able to persuade a commonly respected authority (a court?) to instruct you to cease, desist, pay fines and remuneration, and even arrest and imprison you! Anything preemptive, however, is censorship, and interference with everyone's free speech rights and copyright. They have a right to make an original model ship without asking anyone's permission; you have a right to make an original photograph without asking anyone's permission. However, society is complex, and it looks like considerate behavior on your part to ask before taking certain actions. Regardless of thorough and well based advice, any actions you tale may be the basis for someone else to challenge you, no matter how careful you are, whether they (or you) be right or wrong! Welcome to the free world! > -----Original Message----- > Date: Tue, 6 Nov 2007 11:20:03 +0100 > From: "Rama Rama" <ramaneko(a)gmail.com> > Subject: [Commons-l] Are models works or arts ? > > Hello, > > a while ago, I was in Paris to photograph the Naval Museum. They have models of ships, which can be either > * ancient arsenal models (at the time a scale model was considered to be part of the documentation of a ship, along with the plans), but also > * modern models of modern ships, and even, more treacherously, > * modern models of ancient ships > > I'd like to have an educated opinion on what constitutes a work of art in this domain. We have quite a few photographs of recent scale models like http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Croiseur-Colbert-p1000458.jpg > or http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:LNG_tanker_model.jpg > > Some of the recent models are credited to their authors as if they were sculptures, so there might be a strong case to consider them as original, copyrighted works of art whose photographs cannot be photographed freely. > > I have quite a few such images in my pipeline, I'd be glad to know what to do with them. > > -- Rama

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Attributor: tracking copyvios across the web
by Brianna Laugher 06 Nov '07

06 Nov '07

http://www.attributor.com/ http://tinyurl.com/2ha5fo TechCrunch: Attributor Launches Service to Track Copyright Infringement Across the Web Images & video are in beta. I'm not exactly sure how it's going to work but if they have some free web preview it might be useful (both for checking if something is a copyvio, and seeing where your work from Commons has been used). cheers, Brianna -- They've just been waiting in a mountain for the right moment: http://modernthings.org/

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[Fwd: [Translators-l] [Web community] Invitation to join Wiki-translation]
by Charli Li 06 Nov '07

06 Nov '07

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 This might be something interesting for the multilingual community. Enjoy. - -------- Original Message -------- Subject: [Translators-l] [Web community] Invitation to join Wiki-translation Date: Tue, 06 Nov 2007 02:25:38 +0900 From: Aphaia <aphaia snail gmail.com> Reply-To: Wikimedia Translators <translators-l> To: Wikimedia Translators <translators-l> CC: Alain.Desilets snail nrc-cnrc dot gc dot ca Hi Wikimedia translators, on behalf of Alain Desilets, <Alain.Desilets(a)nrc-cnrc.gc.ca>, I forward his invitation to a new wiki and translation related community, named Wiki-translation. Before his own words, let me introduce Alain (some of you may know him as a professional translator or WikiSym organizer). He is a Canadian translator and gave a talk at the last Wikimania, where we met in my Birds of Feather about translation on and around wiki. BoF was interesting with several inputs ... including his prolific ones. As one of its result, we have held a general discussion place for wiki and translation, which we'd introduce on this email. The community newly launched will focus on how and what is doing translation on wiki: it is not same to do on your laptop alone ... it has many unexplored potential, technically, sociologically or even economically. We'd like to dig those wiki-editing translation particularity, in interaction with many types of wiki editors, of course, including MediaWiki/Wikimedia translators. Your participation will be warmly welcome :) Cheers, ================ From: "Alain.Desilets(a)nrc-cnrc.gc.ca" <Alain.Desilets(a)nrc-cnrc.gc.ca> Subject: Invitation to join Wiki-translation Date: Nov 6, 2007 12:46 AM This is an invitation to join the wiki-translation community: www.wiki-translation.com Feel free to forward it to anyone who might be interested. Wiki-translation is a community for discussing the impact of the wikipedia phenomenon on the world of translation. It is a place for people who are interested in translation using a massively collaborative wiki paradigm. It is a place where we can exchange best practices and tools for collaborative translation, and learn how to use them to improve translation quality and productivity. The community was started in the Fall of 2007, as a result of online and hallway discussions between the following people (in alphabetical order): * Louise Brunette, Peter Cowen, Alain Désilets, Lucas Gonzalez, Louis-Philippe Huberdeau , S.J. Klein, Nelson Ko, Marc Laporte, Jérémie Leblanc, Thomasz Muldner, Cola Nahaboo, Kizu Naoko,Xavier de Pedro Puente, Sébastien Paquet. The following is a sample of topics which are deemed relevant: * Practices and tools for translating any wiki content, including but not limited to Wikipedia pages. * Practices and tools for translating any content (wiki or not) which is open, constantly evolving and may never reach a final stable state. * Practices and tools for translating any content using a wiki-like process. By that, we mean a process that presents many of the characteristics of wikis like: open, massively collaborative, asynchronous, loosely coordinated and controlled, volunteer-based, etc.... * Practices and tools for creating and using wiki-like dictionaries and resources (ex: Wikipedia, Wiktionary, OmegaWiki) for the purpose of translating any content (wiki or not). * Research and development to make any of the above easier and more efficient. Here is how you can join this community: 1) First, register on the wiki-translation site * Go to http://www.wiki-translation.com/tiki-register.php * Fill in the form. * Note: You do not HAVE to be registered to participate in the community, but registration will make it easier for you and the rest of the community to interact together. 2) Then, monitor the site's discussion forum * Go to http://www.wiki-translation.com/tiki-view_forum.php?forumId=2 * Click on the first eye icon (beside New topic button) * Note: Monitoring the discussion forum allows you to receive email notification whenever a new message is posted. 3) Finally, browse the site's wiki pages and contribute * Go to http://www.wiki-translation.com/ * You can edit any page from there, simply by clicking on the edit button or link at the bottom of the page. * Note: You might want to consult our editing policy at: http://www.wiki-translation.com/tiki-index.php?page=Editing+Policy If you have any questions on how to participate in this community, we recommend that: * You look at our list of Frequently Asked Questions: http://www.wiki-translation.com/tiki-index.php?page=FAQs+for+this+wiki&bl * You post questions on the discussion forum: http://www.wiki-translation.com/tiki-view_forum.php?forumId=2 We look forward to your participation, and hope you will find it useful and worthwhile. __ KIZU Naoko Wikiquote <http://wikiquote.org> is a free online project for building collections of quotations, hosted by Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. Quote of the Day (English): http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/WQ:QOTD - -- Charli (vishwin/O) Butters: Please sir, I have to get home to my world. Mayor: Oh, well, all you have to do is tap your heels together three times. Butters: Really?? Mayor: No you fucking dipshit, that was a joke! -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.7 (Cygwin) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFHMKPW/5CaUKx925YRAliuAKCEtKkoNajyV62zRh433aSD1gLX5ACfbvnR E9bq7re/cQfNtRSSKvxmDRM= =Lc6u -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Are models works or arts ?
by Rama Rama 06 Nov '07

06 Nov '07

Hello, a while ago, I was in Paris to photograph the Naval Museum. They have models of ships which can be either * ancient arsenal models (at the time a scale model was considered to be part of the documentation of a ship, along with the plans), but also * modern models of modern ships, and even, more treacherously, * modern models of ancient ships I'd like to have an educated opinion on what constitutes a work of art in this domain. We have quite a few photographs of recent scale models like http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Croiseur-Colbert-p1000458.jpg or http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:LNG_tanker_model.jpg Some of the recent models are credited to their authors as if they were sculptures, so there might be a strong case to consider them as original, copyrighted works of art whose photographs cannot be photographed freely. I have quite a few such images in my pipeline, I'd be glad to know what to do with them. -- Rama

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Commons-l November 2007