On 4/1/07, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
Because the feature still needs quite a bit of work, and the full specifications at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/InstantCommons answer some of the questions that would inevitably come up. We've already dealt with these questions, as well, when we originally proposed the project to WMF and the Board of Trustees. I will answer them again in some depth when the feature has been implemented up to specs.
Yes, and I whined about the copyright issues then, and I've yet to see fully satisfactory answers.
With around 200k out of 1.5million images deleted thus far and more every day,I do not believe commons is yet at a point of maturity where the automatic redistribution of our images would be a socially responsible action.
In order to get there I think we need to take at least two major steps forward in the quality of our work. We're making good progress but, like all things, it takes time.
We need to be mindful that one of the major differentiators between commons and other user contributed online image repositories is our responsiveness to copyright infringement concerns. We are remarkably more responsive than most other user contributed image repositories, and and automated image-live-mirror system without automated revocation puts that status in jeopardy.
It can be argued that we're already have the mirror problem with text, but text has a long term trend of far fewer copyright complaints per item than media, and with things like automated text copyright violation detection (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Suspected_copyright_violations) our review mechanisms for text are clearly more sophisticated.
Text mirrors also tend to be either fairly spammy sites whos violations no one would fault us for, or live feed recipients which preserve our responsiveness.