On 25/09/2007, Ian Woollard <ian.woollard(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I don't know, the image stuff is a total balls-up
IMO. As an example I found
an image of a Skylon tower on the internet. The image was *not* free, but I
contacted the guy that owned copyright and he relicensed it, but to non
commercial only. I had no choice, that was what he chose.
So I uploaded it on wikimedia.
An admin guy removed it on the grounds that it was not allowed to be sold
commercially. The guy that did it also accused me of lying about having gone
to the trouble of relicensing it; even when I had included the email
permitting its use in the text when I uploaded it as well.
I have mixed feelings to say the least about deletions on the grounds of
being non commercial, the article was left without any images at all, and
there was and is no free replacement anywhere (in the end I uploaded a
god-awful sketch I made). It would be much better just to strip out the non
commercial images when appropriate.
Did anyone gain from the deletion? No; the wikipedia site itself lost an
image, and we had a legitimate license to use it for non commercial reasons.
The term non commercial is legaly nightmareish
And the upload pages UI is a complete disaster, even
when I'm uploading
stuff that's completely legitimate half the time it gets put up for deletion
on purely bureaucratic reasons; it's not at all obvious (or it wasn't I
haven't uploaded recently) what the heck you were supposed to do?
All in all, I'm not surprised we don't have more pictures, the system is so
very bad in loads of ways, unless the image is public domain, there's almost
no chance in practice that you can use it.
The tower was built in 1951 and was a goverment project. As such PD
photos almost certianly exist. Goverment drawings published prior to
1956 will be PD as will any goverment photo taken proir to 1956. So
the problem becomes getting acess to such a photo.
Now the photo here is PD however the scan my not be
http://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/archive/exhibits/festival/list_details.asp…
Generaly we counter the scan copyright issue by getting out friends in
the US (where the scan is PD) to upload.
--
geni