On 3 March 2013 12:10, Jane Darnell jane023@gmail.com wrote: ...

In that discussion, the whole category for the Washington, DC Vietnam memorial was nominated for deletion, see here: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:WhatLinksHere/Category:Vietnam_Vet... The last word on that discussion was "I called the Smithsonian and the Park Service about this. Aside from laughing, they were confused why anyone would assume that the copyright was owned by anyone except the USGov, or that it wan't in the PD. I can't get anyone on the record about this."

I would go so far as to assume that the same is true for Dutch WWII memorials, and if we cannot come up with a good way of preserving Dutch WWII memorial images for the Dutch Wikimedia community to use in any Wikipedia project (so not just the NL wiki), then I propose a Dutch Wikipedia blackout on May 4th out of protest, since obviously the only hindrance is the fear of Wikimedia Commons users that they will be legally pursued, and I assume that this fear is real enough that we can go public with it.

On a personal level, as a Dutch citizen, I would be willing to be the first to be tried legally on such an issue, and after my discussion this morning, I believe I could crowd source my legal fees with support from the Dutch Wikipedia community.

Hi Jane,

I know it's all rather frustrating. I suggest a common sense approach to the Commons community. There are a few rather good copyright wikilawyers that dominate the discussion on Commons, the primary way of handling them (us?) is to make sure that there is (i) clear policy or agreed guidelines and (ii) legal clarification and external advice where this would be helpful. Our critical wikilawyers do not make the law, but they do help highlight how daft it can be at times. :-)

Now, in the *real world*, there is unlikely to be any issue were the GLAM project you envisage to upload 1,000 or 100,000 images. A tiny percentage will be deleted for various reasons, as a matter of course, no matter how hard you try to run detailed guidelines. The idea that such a project either must not proceed, or would be judged a failure by the Wikimedia community, were a single image to be a potential copyright problem, is not feasible, and we do not want such great projects to be paralysed for fear of criticism because we have not got full answers to every possible risk. The key Commons policy to consider is the Precautionary Principle, so long as there are no *significant* doubts with regard to copyright, then this indicates it is perfectly okay to upload images where one has taken simple and obvious precautions.[1]

Commons benefits from another great community approach, that of staying mellow, you may want to take the Smithsonian's approach and laugh most of this away. I suggest rather than brinkmanship and calling for black-outs and legal cases, you consider different avenues of community consultation, such as relevant questions on the village pump, the copyright noticeboard and set up a GLAM Commons WikiProject page for long term guidelines for your project members to discuss and improve. With such consultation banked, it would be hard for anyone to come along later and criticise you for not trying to address the issue and reach a practical conclusion.[2][3][4][5]

My viewpoint is as a well known Wikimedia Commons contributor with 40,000+ image uploads, 600,000+ edits and over 1.2 million further edits by bot. Oh, and I do other more important stuff too. :-D

Links 1. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Project_scope/Precautionary_princi... 2. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Staying_mellow 3. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:GLAM 4. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump/Copyright 5. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump

Cheers, Fae