Since Eric was posting a hint on all common admins talk pages I use this opportunity to talk about a subject I strongly feel about.
BTW I am subscribing to this ML and have been since the beginning. The reason I have not been reading the ML or making posts here is a completly differnt one.
When I was trying to go through the deletion tags to dispose images that are against the commons policy I found the following:
http://commons.wikimedia.org//wiki/Template%3ASlovakCityCOA
Concerning COAs my believe always was that we have to care about:
1) Copyright(, Urheberrecht,...) whatever it may be in your country 2) It must be commercial. 3) People must be able to modify it.
To 1) in most cases we do not need to care about that dealing with COAs since they are ooooooooooold. However the points 2) and 3) make me feel uneasy and I know there was a long discussion on de WP.
Concerning point 2) some of you might know that the german newspaper "Die Zeit" was using the COA of the federal state and city Hamburg and needed to change the COA on the front cover because of a senat decision in Hamburg. Personally I think that such a behaviour is silly. I mean it is not like they have been printing toilet paper with the COA of Hamburg and selling the stuff. Even printing the COA of a town on t-shirts and selling them could cause legal trouble IMHO.
To 3) the Brockhaus Multimedial (a germen encyclopedia on DVD) uses stylised COAs. I totally do not get why they did that. What I am saying is that this could be interpreted as a modification plus commercial use. Modifing a COA and selling the stuff on some merchandising items could cause legal problems too IMHO.
Summary: I do not think that COA go 100% with wikimedia project policies concerning points 2 and 3. Personally I even think that COAs as a picture in an encyclopedia are nice to have but not necessary. But since they seem accepted in the Wikimedia projects commons should keep them all and without exception since they are PD with some legal framework attached to them. Therfore I suggest that in cases like the slovak COA we ignore the terms of use and leave it up to the one that uses these images to read the terms of use. The slovak terms of use do not even seem very strikt as far as I can understand the language.
Last but not least I think that the wikimedia projects had the wrong approach dealing with COAs. They should IMHO have waived using them. Only COAs that had 100% leagal permissions from the city/country should have been used. While the WM-projects were growing there could have been an open window to leagaly enforce WM-projects to use the COAs because the cities would have wanted us to use them because without saying the WM-projects make even the smallest town known in the internet.
What do you think?
greetings
Paddy
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