On Wed, 28 Jan 2015, Dimitar Parvanov Dimitrov wrote: Hello Dimitar, During Chaos Communications Congress I've had a few conversations with various stakeholders (including Julia Reda, pirate MEP) and I expressed my concern about proposed harmonisation of the copyright directive. At the end of Julia's speech I have asked a question, whether harmonisation of copyright would mean "harmonizing down" all the copyright exceptions: http://media.ccc.de/browse/congress/2014/31c3_-_6350_-_en_-_saal_2_-_201412… Your email raises another concern to me: whether we have to fight a new battle for every single one copyright exception (like freedom of panorama, no copyright for official documents, etc. etc.)? What do you think? Marcin Cieślak

I cannot give you a good answer to your specific question - I'm sorry, I don't know of any examples of people actually trying to enforce sanctions for a FoP violation. However, I do have a related idea for what might be possible if we get to the more 'public lobbying' and 'public awareness' stage of fighting for unified FoP... On the English wikipedia, we used to have a placeholder-image on biography page infoboxes without a photo - encouraging people to submit their own image if they had one. (this practice is now stopped for a variety of reasons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Image_placeholders ) I have often wondered - could we have a similar "placeholder image" on articles where FoP restricts us from displaying an image? That is, in the size and location where there SHOULD be an image, we have display a graphic that says: "We are not allowed to show you this building, *click here* to learn why" Clicking the link would take you to a documentation page describing FoP, what we're fighting for, contact details for the local politician, whatever... That way, when the public on the French wikipedia visit "Atomium" https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomium they immediately understand that it is NOT our fault that we don't have an image of the sculpture, but the fault of the law. I realise, it would be both technically and organisationally a little difficult to achieve this: - Technically it would require some coding or clever use of categories to identify which articles should have this placeholder image. Also it would require technical considerations to decide who receives this message - perhaps only people visiting the wikipedia article who are in an IP address from a country without FoP? - Organisationally, it would require careful negotiation with the relevant wiki communities to get consensus that this form of overt political lobbying is acceptable. It would be a similar (but not so drastic) question to the debate about SOPA. A simpler idea, of course, would be simply to show a banner, once, to all non-logged-in readers from European IP addresses, but the organisation questions would still remain. I think one of the reasons that FoP is not standard across more countries is that it is just such an obscure law, and something that most people would never even imagine has any restrictions on it - "but I just saw a photo of the Eiffel Tower on Facebook" would be a common reply. Using our massive visibility (like we did for SOPA) would be a way to get people to be aware of the problems of the lack of FoP exceptions in a circumstance that they have personal/direct relationship to. They would see the specific implications of the law if they were informed that WP is not allowed to show them a photo of what they just came looking to learn about. Just an idea... -Liam wittylama.com Peace, love & metadata On 28 January 2015 at 10:34, Dimitar Parvanov Dimitrov < dimitar.parvanov.dimitrov(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: