One problem is that it's often not clear who actually *has* that authority
in most organisations, even for someone within it. Where they deal with
image licensing as a general rule (cultural institutions, publishers,
media, etc) there'll usually be a system in place, but if not, the person
we're dealing with will basically have to guess, or else keep referring it
upwards until approved or, more likely, it vanishes into the ether.
If they do take a gamble and release it, and someone later objects... well,
it's very easy to say "sorry, it turns out I never had authority after
all". The lack of any visible process makes this an eminently defensible
position - who can challenge it, without knowing how that authority is laid
out?
A couple of probable rules of thumb for our own comfort:
a) The more senior the contact (or the smaller the organisation they're in)
the more likely they are to have authority;
b) Any indication that a legal, publishing, or licensing department was
involved, the more likely it is to be supported
- Andrew.
On Tuesday, 18 September 2012, David Gerard wrote:
On 18 September 2012 01:27, Ryan Kaldari
<rkaldari(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Just please make sure that whoever you talk to is
actually authorized to
legally donate the rights to the images. We've had several cases where
someone at a company has donated a collection of images, but we later
had to
delete them all because the representative
didn't actually control the
rights. PETA and Cafe Magazine are 2 examples I remember off the top of
my
head.
Oh, ouch. Do we have writeups on said cases? What would constitute
sufficient evidence?
- d.
_______________________________________________
Commons-l mailing list
Commons-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
--
- Andrew Gray
andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk