On 10 February 2010 13:21, Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk wrote:
I've sometimes thought that, in an ideal world, we should just phase out PD-old and all its forms - it's often, as you say, wishful thinking, or sometimes (and I know in my early days I did this) a cover for a misunderstanding about just what the thresholds are. So what'd we replace it with? Something functionally like... {{copyright |date=1895 |location=Germany |author=anonymous }} ...and have it then spit out, well, "this image is free under German copyright law (sect. 473 ii) and in the United States (Title 15, 7)" or the like, with an option to click to have it generate a copyright status in Canada or France or where have you. We do *have* this data for a sizable proportion of our images, after all, and it's a bit lazy when we take all this and slap a "well, PD, I guess" rubber-stamp on it! I doubt this is *practical* in the near term, of course, but it's a thought. Any other ideas?
I think this is a brilliant idea and would deal with the problem marvellously. And it should be reasonably easy to implement in an incremental manner without disruption.
cc to commons-l - is there anything about this that'd be hard? Apart from going through a zillion images. The key point is it wouldn't disrupt anything existing.
- d.