-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1
SlimVirgin wrote:
On Mon, Feb 8, 2010 at 17:22, Michael Peel email@mikepeel.net wrote:
However, that is somewhat separate from the question of images that are in the public domain _somewhere_. It is somewhat crazy that US laws dictate what public domain materials you can upload to Wikipedia etc - irrespective of what laws apply in your own country.
One possibility that might be worth investigating is something like Wikilivres - which holds books that are out of copyright in Canada (life+50 years) but not in the US. It can do that as its servers are based in Canada. Could we do something similar with Wikimedia Commons? i.e. host multimedia content on a server in a different geographical area, and then have that linked in with Wikipedia in the same way that Commons currently is?
Or we could simply make a decision as a project to respect the copyrights and the terms of release of the countries of origin.
I'm dealing with an image at the moment of Palestinian women refugees resting after being expelled from their homes as the Israeli army approached in 1948. It's in the public domain in Israel, which now controls the area in which the image was taken. I am 99.9 percent certain it was taken by an employee of the British War Office, which would make it public domain in Britain and the Commonwealth (and as far as the British are concerned that makes it PD everywhere). I sent off for an old first edition of a book I knew it had appeared in in the 1950s in the hope that it would explicitly credit the War Office, but sadly it doesn't.
Because of that small doubt, I have to claim fair use. And because I am claiming fair use, someone has said I will have to reduce the quality of the image for it to comply with our fair-use policy. It's insane.
I'd like to point out that in fact, these images would be accepted on to Commons, because Commons respects the country of origin rule rather than the PD-US rule that more often applies on the English Wikipedia.
- -- Cary Bass Volunteer Coordinator, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate