On 02/03/2008, Ron Ritzman ritzman@gmail.com wrote:
On 3/2/08, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
By "my picture" I presume you mean one of you rather than by you. We had some time back the case of a user who had himself photographed in front of a major European tourist attraction. IIRC some people were claiming that he should have gotten permission from the convenient passerby who actually snapped the shot before he put the picture online. Since it was a picture of him it was obvious that he did not take it himself. :-(
Now that's "wikilawyering".
Indeed. But then, it's an example of why we're so damn paranoid about licensing, copyright and so on - the threat model for freely-licensed content is an assertion of copyright violation by an insane vindictive asshole who owns the copyright in question.
Do we have everything in order that we could quickly and successfully defend our continued use? Failing that, could we show that removal almost immediately upon notification showed enough good faith not to be liable for damages, given not just our noted quick response to valid assertions but our proactive policing of new additions for copyright violation? (Answer: almost certainly.)
This leads to complaints of excessive bureaucracy from people trying to *give* us stuff they almost certainly *do* own the copyright to ... but it's vastly important to our free content mission to do the right thing and be seen to do the right thing with regard to copyrights.
(And not to mention that Wikipedia has enough people who want it fucking dead, and work with psychotic dedication to this goal. No reason to hand them attack vectors either.)
- d.