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Message: 4 Date: Mon, 9 Jul 2012 10:42:25 +0100 From: Adam Cuerden cuerden@gmail.com To: commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Commons-l] Moving forwards (Was "Does Commons have a policy of violating UK copyright?") Message-ID: <CADQwQSNLGYYYGteQdTTyg_-w= PndjUr6+KcB7ws9GQ32-+TMww@mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

So, Cary, the end of discussion is that Commons *does* have a policy of violating UK copyright?

Seriously?

That's a rather provocative and over simplistic way of putting it. The servers are in the US so any upload anywhere in the world has to comply with US law. Individual editors are personally responsible for their actions being compliant with the law where they upload images and where they take photos; These could be very different legal jurisdictions. Any of our users worldwide should be confident that the images which we hold comply with US law; If they have stricter laws in their country then that is between them and the law where they live. We could try to do things very differently:

1. We could relocate Wikimedia Commons from the US to UK so that UK not US copyright was the relevant law. 2. We could adopt a policy of trying to comply with multiple sometimes conflicting copyright laws, and only hosting it in Commons if it complied with some complex hybrid set of rules that included the laws of Afghanistan Zimbabwe and a couple of hundred others. 3. We could give up on this globalisation fad and have a separate Commons in each legal jurisdiction which only had to comply with that country's laws and was only usable in that country.

Somehow I can't see any of those options getting consensus on commons, and the latter two wouldn't work very smoothly either.

WSC