That's a valid point, but I'm coming at it from different direction:  
works that are public domain in the country of origin but not in the  
US. I don't view that as gaming the copyright system, as I'm based in  
the UK and I don't view Wikimedia as an American website/set of  
projects. If a UK photographer's works are public domain in the UK  
but not in the US, there shouldn't be anything stopping me uploading  
them to (some variant of) Commons and tagging them as life+70 but not  
US-PD.

Mike

On 9 Feb 2010, at 09:00, Rama Neko wrote:

  

We do not game copyright laws in this way.

You can see an example with Heinrich Hoffman's photographs: the USA
consider them to be in the Public Domain in apparent disregard for
international law on copyright; these photographs are protected by
copyright  in Germany, where they are the object of very proprietary
publications. The policy on Commons is that we do not accept such
images.

-- Rama

On 09/02/2010, Michael Peel <email@mikepeel.net> wrote:
    

On 8 Feb 2010, at 23:05, Ken Arromdee wrote:

      

This is also a particular problem with pictures of living people,
since we've
been told that since it's *possible* to take another picture of a
living
person, all non-free images of living people are prohibited.  The
official
way of interpreting "it's possible to" takes no consideration of
just how
possible it is.  In any other context this would be considered
rules-lawyering--
we're basically officially rules-lawyering our own policies.
        

Personally, I think we should remove all non-free images from all
language Wikipedias (and everywhere else they occur) - as they make
it difficult to get freely licensed content off people that already
have that content. Case study: I emailed ESA to ask for a photograph
of a satellite to use in an article; they provided a 200 pixel image
I could use as 'fair use' in return. In the past, we weren't big
enough to have any leverage to get that content released - but now we
are, and we could have that leverage if we want to take advantage  
of it.

However, that is somewhat separate from the question of images that
are in the public domain _somewhere_. It is somewhat crazy that US
laws dictate what public domain materials you can upload to Wikipedia
etc - irrespective of what laws apply in your own country.

One possibility that might be worth investigating is something like
Wikilivres - which holds books that are out of copyright in Canada
(life+50 years) but not in the US. It can do that as its servers are
based in Canada. Could we do something similar with Wikimedia
Commons? i.e. host multimedia content on a server in a different
geographical area, and then have that linked in with Wikipedia in the
same way that Commons currently is? There shouldn't be any concerns
about having thumbnail images of these works on Wikipedia, as these
are all done under fair use anyway (e.g. all of those uncredited CC-
BY-SA images...).

Mike

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