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.