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@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.
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- Andrew Gray
andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk