On Tue, Apr 1, 2008 at 3:06 PM, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
Ian Woollard wrote:
On 01/04/2008, Betacommand Betacommand@gmail.com wrote:
How about we grow up and do something constructive, The image is Public Domain per United States Government Policy, since the underlying image is PD just remove the parts that are not.
They're *all* public domain, even the logo. There's a legal restriction that you can't do stuff like misrepresent NASA and use the logo for *other* things, but IMHO anybody that does that is up to no good and deserves all they get. The wikimedia tag used is quite specific anyway and we don't need to remove anything.
I (tentatively) agree with Ian here. The restrictions on reuse do not seem to be anything like a no-derivs license.
Free re-use is something that we insist upon only with respect to copyright (and perhaps if some other non-copyright restrictions were onerous enough, we would refuse that as well). Saying that you can't use an image to commit fraud, etc., is not a restriction on reuse that bothers us. Nor should it.
--Jimbo
This point is extremely apt and seems to have been missed. *Every* image we host has restrictions we can't overcome on its reuse. I'm legally barred from engaging in Libel, Sedition or Alarming the Queen, and yet I could (presumably) modify any freely licensed image to do this anyways. And there's no licence I can select to get around this. Panaramic shots can be freely used, but if I clip out the Coke ad in a shot of Times Square, it's no longer free. Trademarked items can infringe on various reuses, but nonetheless we use green squares, even though someone reusing it for the tax company logo could certainly be sued.
Re-use will always be subject to restrictions. We cannot hope to promise that transformative downstream users will be legally clear. All we can hope to do is not add restrictions and promise straight reprintings are in the clear.
Cheers WilyD