On 9/6/06, Brianna Laugher brianna.laugher@gmail.com wrote:
On 07/09/06, Matt Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
Pictures of living people also have restrictions on them. In some jurisdictions, there is in fact no way for any model release or contract to remove all restrictions; the person depicted still has some rights over the image. Pictures which contain living people even incidentally are also restricted, especially if no model release or contract has been signed. The picture as a whole is PROBABLY legally non-problematic, but if cropped down to show only a person or group as the main subject would be a problem.
Yes... well probably it would do no great harm to have much stronger requirements with regards to model releases and the like. I don't think policy on this area is complete. Morally we have more of a responsibility to develop something watertight here, but from a legal perspective trademarks seem more dangerous to me due to large companies' deep pockets (and attraction to the courts).
Dangerous how? Do you know of any cases where an encyclopedia was sued for violating trademark law when it included a trademarked image in one of its articles? Are there any trademark holders threatening to sue Wikimedia for trademark infringement, in cases where the copyright status is clear?
What about the forks and mirrors? Have any of them complained that *they* were getting threatened over trademark issues?
I don't know the answer to these questions, so maybe it is a problem and I just don't know about it. If it is a problem (dangerous from a legal perspective), then we should be talking about banning trademarked images from all Wikipedias, not just from Wikimedia Commons. If it isn't a problem, then I see no reason for a new policy.
I've decided to modify my suggestion slightly: "If an image is useable under the rules of the majority of Wikimedia projects, then it can be in commons. Otherwise, it can't." I suspect the difference between "the majority of" and "all" is minor, but this removes some corner cases (maybe French Wikipedia is especially paranoid about lawsuits over photos of buildings, for instance).
Anthony