On 5/21/06, Peter Mackay peter.mackay@bigpond.com wrote:
You seem to be saying it's OK to break the law if you can get away with it, but I think you misunderstand my point.
I'm not saying that at all. Whether or not something actually breaks the law in copyright issues is never clear cut. What I'm saying we do is go with the good-faith assumption that in these cases the users have the ability to set the license of the photo, and are willing to take the legal flack if it turns out they gave us false information about it. I'm also saying that the risk of this being a problem is so low as to be basically nonexistant.
I agree that these photographs are (mostly) non-controversial. But what is the absolutely correct way of uploading them so we can use them with *zero* risk of being sued?
There is no way to have zero risk of being sued. But I think in cases like this, the chances of being sued are so low as to not warrant a separate policy.
If we have real concerns about individual pictures being mis-licensed, we can contact the user who uploaded it as usual. When it is clearly a picture which originates from the user his- or herself, and is not something which appears to be high-risk (I consider a snapshot of a non-famous person in a not-interesting context to be pretty low risk), and there is no way to know whether or not the user "truly" has the legalities of it spelled out in hard ink, I say we assume that it is unlikely to be a problem. Certainly not something worth splitting legal hairs over, in my opinion.
Jimbo seems to have gone about it by obeying the rules. Perhaps we should emulate his example?
Sure, emulate him, go ahead, it can't hurt. But we don't need a new policy about it.
FF