Al Jazeera in Flickr goes cc-by-sa - Commons-l

23 Nov 2011

Dear Cultural-patners-l and Commons-l,
As some of you know I'm currently in Qatar at the invitation of
CreativeCommons Qatar talking to various GLAMs. We met with the good folks
from Al Jazeera English the other day and discussed various ways that we
could work together in the future - based on the great early work of the Al
Jazeera CC portal: http://cc.aljazeera.net/ (copied in to this email is
Bilal from Al Jazeera and Brian from CC.Qatar). One of the specific
questions that they asked me was about why does Wikipedia use screenshots
from those videos rather that using their still images from flickr
directly. The reason is, as we know, was that the Al Jazeera photostream on
Flickr was licensed as cc-by-ND.

So... It is now my pleasure to pass on a message from Bilal:

Hi Liam - I've updated our Flickr account and all images are now available
under the CC share-alike option.

EXCELLENT! :-) Everyone, have a look at some of the gorgeous photos
available here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/aljazeeraenglish/sets/ they
cover topics from Hajj to the Gaza War, and many different countries
involved in the "Arab Spring". Not only are these beautiful pictures with
great provenance they are also extremely encyclopedic and impossible to
replace. They are all taken by Al Jazeera journalists in the field.
Furthermore, this is an amazingly fast turnaround time for changing a large
institution's copyright policy :-)

Let's start getting these across to Wikimedia Commons in the Category
"files from Al Jazeera"
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Files_from_Al_Jazeera and start
integrating them into various WP articles!

Is there someone who can dedicate a bot to sucking these across to Flickr
straight away?
Perhaps we can also create a nice "partnership template" too?
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Partnership_templates

Sincerely,
-Liam

wittylama.com/blog
Peace, love & metadata