On 9/6/06, Brianna Laugher <brianna.laugher(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 07/09/06, Matt Brown <morven(a)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