On 19/09/06, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
In the World Cup example, at least, Commons seems to have decided that it's not our job to enforce them---it's between FIFA and the photographer whether the pictures were taken in violation of a contract, and not really our job to pry into the matter, even if we suspect they were probably not taken with permission.
Yeah. But there's a difference between "we're not going to ask" and "we're going to actively promote that you can do this quasi-legally", and we often seem to be slipping towards the latter, by assuming copyright is the only relevant factor.
I'm not sure that's a position we *must* take, but it does seem to be the one we're currently taking. There are problems with the opposite position, too, that would at least require us to come up with something more complex/nuanced. For example, we'd probably want to reserve the right to publish pictures taken illegally in complex political situations---if somebody snapped a newsworthy photograph during a coup, for example, which the government later declared illegal, we would probably not want to take it down for that reason (or at least I wouldn't want us to have such a policy).
We've quite the collection of illegally-produced material - most of the illustrations of revolutionary propaganda, for a start...