On Mon, Feb 8, 2010 at 2:37 PM, SlimVirgin slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
On Sun, Feb 7, 2010 at 20:24, Carcharoth carcharothwp@googlemail.com wrote:
On Mon, Feb 8, 2010 at 2:05 AM, SlimVirgin slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
What kind of reusers do we have in mind? The reason I ask is that the image policies are crippling, or the way they're being applied is. I've lost count of the number of times Holocaust images are proposed for deletion because, we're told, there's a free equivalent somewhere. Prisoners risked their lives in concentration camps to smuggle out images to prove to the world what was happening, images that are PD in their country of origin, yet we're not supposed to use them (in the opinion of some Wikipedians) because they're not PD in the U.S. and there might be a free equivalent somewhere. If this is happening to make things easier for reusers, it would be good to know who they are and what this kind of policy application protects them from, because all it does is cause problems for us.
Possibly the reusers who stick images on T-shirts and mugs and sell them?
I can't tell whether that's a serious answer. I hope we're not making editors jump through all these hoops, and depriving readers of important historical images, for the benefit of people who sell T-shirts. :(
I believe the answer is serious in as much as the most contested (but allowed) re-use-cases of Commons content are for commercial purposes. It is a use-case that is both difficult to explain to many copyright holders but also important for us to retain as a standard for our free-culture project.
I agree that it is annoying to think of commons admins going to all this trouble just for the benefit of unknown people selling t-shirts, but if people *aren't* allowed to sell t-shirts then it's not free-culture project.
For the record, I agree with George Herbert (above): "We should not get lazy and rely on [legal requirements in the US], but we also should not be too defensive or paranoid." As they say about Fair Use - use it or lose it!
-Liam [[witty lama]]