On Thu, May 9, 2013 at 1:49 PM, Andreas Kolbe jayen466@gmail.com wrote:
Pete,
I don't know which Commons you participate in. The one I know has tons of nude pictures of women uploaded by anonymous throwaway accounts, with no indication whatsoever that the women concerned are aware of and have consented to the upload,
<snip>
Andreas, you are of course correct. I believe two factors address the distance between what you and I said:
(1) The word "consent" is not qualified in the Board's resolution, which invites this critical question in every case: are we talking about consent to be photographed, or consent to have the photo released under a free license on a widely viewed, open access web site? This is obviously a question of critical importance. The resolution's language doesn't provide much guidance. In practice, the places where Commons participants do well are with photos where it's visually clear that the subject may not have consented to being photographed at all, in the first place (i.e., no reason to believe the subject is even aware of the camera).
(2) The existence of files on Commons, vs. the ones where somebody takes the trouble to write a well-formed nomination for deletion, is a huge one. My comments concern only the latter; but of course, there are many thousands of files on Commons that could or should be nominated for deletion, but haven't. It's important to acknowledge that while such cases may reflect the intent of the uploading individual, they by no stretch of the imagination reflect the considered judgment of the Commons community.
Pete