On Sat, 29 Jul 2006 16:14:15 +0200, Anthony wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
On 7/29/06, Sherool jamydlan@online.no wrote:
On Wed, 26 Jul 2006 18:20:53 +0200, Anthere Anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
The crime : it was uploaded as a non-derivative license. So, it is proposed for deletion.
And frankly, I can not ask Treanna any more if he would be nice enough to change that license to make it free by wikipedia definition.
Sorry if I'm beeing an insensitive prick here, but why not simply ask his family to change the license? With the author dead the family is the new legal copyright holder (unless he left a will stating otherwise), and we obviosly know how to get in contact with them. I mean by all means give them some time to grieve before confronting them with the GFDL release forms or whatever, but if we are planning to keep the image around permanently it seems like the only real solution. It is what we would have demanded of anyone else (people have literaly been banned for insisting on using NC or ND images of themselves on theyr own userpage), and I for one do not apreciate having double standards. Either we allow every unfree image with a sufficiently compelling "sob storry" to stay, or we stay true to our stated goals of free content even if it means that an image of someone dear to us can not be used. Personaly I favour the later.
I agree with the sentiment, but I think it ignores an important sanity check. Why does the image have to be free in the first place?
It's obviously not a legal reason, as the ND license means things are perfectly legal. So why is just being legal not enough? The reason is so that third parties can use the content.
Well, the image is ND, so third parties *can* use the content, "in all media and formats whether now known or hereafter devised". Further, they can "make such modifications as are technically necessary to exercise the rights in other media and formats". And they can also make any modifications which are permitted under the doctrine of fair use. A third party could copy [[Wikipedia:Deceased Wikipedians]]. They could add other people to it. They could remove some. They could change the text. They could probably enhance the image itself under the doctrine of fair use. They could print out this new copy. They could create an article on Bernard and include the image in it. They could make a newspaper article out of that article. They could broadcast a television show which included the picture in it.
I for one can't think of anything that a third party is going to want to do with this image that they can't legally do, unless it's some troll picking on this image just to make a point.
For me, it has nothing to do with a double standard. The only way I think it could even be argued that it makes sense to ban this image would be if the parents were contacted and they flat out refused to license the image under a free license. Then I suppose you could argue that we should refuse to include the image, basically as an ultimatum. Even then though I tend to be of the opinion that CC-BY-ND is "free enough", especially for an image in the Wikipedia namespace of a person who is almost surely never going to have an article about him.
Our current policy is that we want our content to be (completely) free (wich include the ability to make derivative works) *especialy* in comunity space (since all user contributions are supposed to be free licensed). Granted this is more for "philosophical" reasons (we are a free content project and all that) than practical legal ones, but it *is* the current policy, in fact is is one of the 5 pillars of the project wich states "(...)Do not submit copyright infringements **or works licensed in a way incompatible with the GFDL**." (emphasis mine), and just for the record ND licenses are not compatable with the GFDL.
If you are saying we should change the policy and allow use of unfree (or at least "semi free") contnet in "community space" because it is seperate from our content, then that is one thing, I disagree, but it is a somewhat valid argument. You might be interested in trying to breathe som life back info http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Licensing_for_community_images. However what I'm trying to say is that I'm uncomfortable with the idea of a handfull of users just desciding that in this one case we will simply ignore a core policy of the project because it doesn't allow them to do what they want to.