On 7/27/06, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
Thoughts?
I think the general intent is a good one, though I don't think that the Wikipedia system of government would allow any individual to easily sit in such a position with the exception of Jimbo.
There may be other ways to achieve the same ends, though. Perhaps we could draw up special rules for exceptions on copyright issues -- they would be VERY hard to satisfy and would be designed with the few known cases of "common sense" exceptions in mind (and could amended later if others popped up). Then it could just become part of a deletion review or image policy or what have you.
Personally I think there is a lot of room for a little commonsense flexibiity in images -- people get all bent out of shape about whether or not it is hypothetical that the German government could decide to enforce all copyrights on Nazi photographs that defaulted to them, even though there is no reason to think that they ever will and it is questionable whether or not they have the legal standing to do that even if they wanted to. Ditto with people worrying that just because you can copyright a lighting arrangement scheme, suddenly all photographs of the building with this scheme become derivative works and copyright infringement. In both cases the legal danger is entirely hypothetical and dubious at that -- they are based on stretched and literal interpretations of complicated aspects of the copyright law and nobody has ever been taken to court over them. And yet they are used to delete widely circulated historical content (the Nazi images) or even user-produced free content (in terms of the lighting and architecture issues).
I don't know the best way around it -- having a class of images that says "this image is hypothetically copyrighted but Jesus Christ people it's not ever going to make trouble for anyone, even commercial reusers" is, I think, likely to be misapplied unless it is closely watched. I don't know if that should be done by one individual, by a committee, by anyone who feels up to it, etc.
FF