On Thu, Jun 4, 2009 at 9:59 AM, Andrew Turvey andrewrturvey@googlemail.com wrote:
I've started a discussion at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons_talk:Licensing#Wikimedia_Chapter_C... regarding the policy of Commons on images where the copyright is owned by a recognised chapter.
Commons already recognises an exception for images whose copyrights are owned by the Wikimedia Foundation. This proposal would widen that to cover images whose copyrights are owned by recognised Wikimedia chapters.
For some time Mediawiki has had the technical capacity to use more than one shared media repository simultaneously.
My personal opinion is that non-free materials owned by the Foundation (or chapters, or other authorized uses, etc) should really be shunted to a separate repository with Commons reserved for truly free works.
This could be accomplished either by setting up a new wiki specifically for that purpose or by converting an existing wiki, such as Meta, to also serve as a shared repository. The latter is my preference. Move all the unfree content to Meta and configure the shared repository settings to also pull from Meta so that the various logos and what not would still be accessible to all the projects exactly as they are now.
I think the advantage of clearly separating free and unfree content outweighs the disadvantage of having to maintain two repositories.
-Robert Rohde