Rama, nice post. :) On 07/11/2007, Erik Moeller <erik(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: The thing is... Copyright is hard. It is a brick wall that is high, and I don't know of any way of getting around it easily or quickly that isn't cheating, ie fundamentally wrong, and likely to bite you on the arse in the future. It's like weight loss, there is only one way that works - the hard way. You can be a great Wikimedian and not run into copyright for a long time. You do not have to have a good understanding of copyright in order to be a good contributor. This is because when you're only contributing your own work, you don't run up against the copyright wall. I'm giving my text up for free, OK, and anyone can use it however they like, OK. But *as soon as* you want to include someone else's work -- and for the vast majority of people, this is when they want to include an image by someone else -- you meet the copyright wall. It's just so hard. Even if you wanted to minimise troubles and only pick images from Flickr, you have to know which licenses are the acceptable ones. Then - is this a derivative of anything else? Is it reasonable that this user is in fact the copyright holder? Has this user understood what they have agreed to by picking this license? What if they change it? And this is an easy case. Pick up random-website "attribution" like statements, or PD-age related questions and you can soon give yourself a nice headache, trying to find the correct answer when the fact is there is no one in the world that knows for sure what it is, you only get that certainty with an expensive lawsuit. There is no shortcut through these questions. There's no alternative but to face each one as it comes and see how it applies to that situation. Given that Wikimedia = free content + anyone can edit, it seems that by default it(we) must also take on the task of educating the general public about copyright issues. No one else is doing it, and it's an issue that has to be confronted, so it looks like it's up to us. The instantaneous editing feature of Wikimedia conflicts with the slower copyright learning process. It's pretty obvious that automated templates are not the best solution to this overall dilemma but I don't have any great ideas about where to next. regards, Brianna user:pfctdayelise -- They've just been waiting in a mountain for the right moment: http://modernthings.org/