2008/5/21 contact@robinschwab.ch contact@robinschwab.ch:
Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com hat am 21. Mai 2008 um 14:37 geschrieben:
2008/5/21 contact@robinschwab.ch contact@robinschwab.ch:
Of course you'll find just breadcrumbs on the online version. If you're really interested you'd have to look at the original version where you'll find the Tomb Raider promotional image published as Public Domain.
I'm a little confused here - so this other website Gets Copyright Wrong and is apparently quite confused over what "public domain" means. This is not at all rare on the Internet - why does it impact what Commons should or shouldn't be doing?
You misunderstood. It's not a website. It's the oldest (228y) newspaper in Switzerland and the one with the best reputation. They have their own legal service with copyright specialists.
All the better! That suggests to me that:
a) those copyright specialists are a bit sloppy; or
b) 'public domain' in their parlance fundamentally isn't what we think it is; or
c) we're wildly misinterpreting what they claim as the rights of the image, and no-one's actually claiming it to be public domain.
A seems pretty unlikely. B is possible - I know enwp regularly has faff when people see sentences like. "This information is in the public domain. Copyright ---" and assume it means no copyright rather than, say, a non-copyright meaning of 'public domain', such as 'not secret'. However, it seems unlikely for a *newspaper* to emphasise that.
C seems the most likely to me - because we deal fundamentally and primarily in individual image licenses we tend to see everything in those contexts, and tend to interpret metadata that way. But the rest of the world doesn't tag every image used with its license, doesn't attribute everything upfront, even when they obey the letter of the law - they just do things differently.
[Likewise 'publishing' and 'distributing' these images - they may not even consider it exists as a seperable unit from the text article!]