To get an idea as to what sort of image tagging is currently being used, I did a survey of the license tags applied to the 2000 most recent images uploaded (which represents about 24 hours and 20 minutes of uploading). Of those images, 134 were duplicate uploads or otherwise not accounted for, leaving 1,866 images to check for tags. The detailed results are at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Carnildo/upload_stats
For 1,866 images uploaded, 2,014 license tags were applied:
745 images were tagged as some sort of "fair use". The vast majority used one of the boilerplate templates, with most of the images being tagged as screenshots, covers, logos, and promotional images. Only 26 generic "fair use" tags were used, with most of them being "fair use in".
412 images were tagged with a "public domain" or equivalent tag, with most of these being PD-self and "No rights reserved"
368 images were tagged with a free license tag. 275 of these were GFDL, 77 were Creative Commons, and the rest were an assortment of other free licenses.
176 images were tagged with a license template that doesn't indicate the license status, such as "don't know", "no source", or "no license"
313 images had no license tag at all. This includes images that were deleted before I could check for a license tag, so the number may be misleading.
The "CopyrightedFreeUseProvidedThat" tag is a problem: of the seven images so tagged, two of them had decidedly non-free "provided that" clauses, forbidding modification and commercial use.
-- Mark [[User:Carnildo]]
On 3/8/06, Mark Wagner carnildo@gmail.com wrote:
The "CopyrightedFreeUseProvidedThat" tag is a problem: of the seven images so tagged, two of them had decidedly non-free "provided that" clauses, forbidding modification and commercial use.
I don't remember if I ever asked this question, but are "non-commercial use" images acceptable at all?
Also, you didn't really just manually check 2000 images did you???
Steve
On 3/8/06, Steve Bennett stevage@gmail.com wrote:
On 3/8/06, Mark Wagner carnildo@gmail.com wrote:
The "CopyrightedFreeUseProvidedThat" tag is a problem: of the seven images so tagged, two of them had decidedly non-free "provided that" clauses, forbidding modification and commercial use.
I don't remember if I ever asked this question, but are "non-commercial use" images acceptable at all?
They are permitted if and only if they were uploaded before May 2005, and even then, they should be deleted when a replacement is found.
Also, you didn't really just manually check 2000 images did you???
No. I wrote a program to count every template applied to the images, then spent an hour removing non-license templates, sorting, categorizing, and merging duplicates.
-- Mark [[User:Carnildo]]
On 3/8/06, Mark Wagner carnildo@gmail.com wrote:
The "CopyrightedFreeUseProvidedThat" tag is a problem: of the seven images so tagged, two of them had decidedly non-free "provided that" clauses, forbidding modification and commercial use.
This holds with what I've seen... the majority of the "CopyrightedFreeUseProvidedThat" images that I've seen are not free (some are "provided that this image not be used for commercial use"!) -- enough so that I wonder if it wouldn't be better to get rid of the template altogether and ask the copyright holders of the other images to license under CC-BY.
-Kat
-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mindspillage | (G)AIM:LucidWaking "Once you have tasted flight you will always walk with your eyes cast upward. For there you have been and there you will always be." - Leonardo da Vinci
On 8 Mar 2006, at 14:16, Kat Walsh wrote:
On 3/8/06, Mark Wagner carnildo@gmail.com wrote:
The "CopyrightedFreeUseProvidedThat" tag is a problem: of the seven images so tagged, two of them had decidedly non-free "provided that" clauses, forbidding modification and commercial use.
This holds with what I've seen... the majority of the "CopyrightedFreeUseProvidedThat" images that I've seen are not free (some are "provided that this image not be used for commercial use"!) -- enough so that I wonder if it wouldn't be better to get rid of the template altogether and ask the copyright holders of the other images to license under CC-BY.
As Jimbo pointed out once before, its better to let people upload under these tags and then speedy the images, rather than make them incorrectly label them as free. Hence the unknown tag too.
Feel free to remove them.
Justinc
Kat Walsh wrote:
On 3/8/06, Mark Wagner carnildo@gmail.com wrote:
The "CopyrightedFreeUseProvidedThat" tag is a problem: of the seven images so tagged, two of them had decidedly non-free "provided that" clauses, forbidding modification and commercial use.
This holds with what I've seen... the majority of the "CopyrightedFreeUseProvidedThat" images that I've seen are not free (some are "provided that this image not be used for commercial use"!)
I actually did some poking around in the conditional use image category just last night, and while I didn't keep a rigorous tally I didn't find any that weren't free of onerous conditions. The vast majority of them were simply "free for any use as long as the artist is credited." Perhaps the non-free ones get weeded out over time. But even in the new images that Mark checked only two out of seven were a problem (out of two _thousand_ total) so I don't see this as a major concern.
Kat Walsh wrote:
On 3/8/06, Mark Wagner carnildo@gmail.com wrote:
The "CopyrightedFreeUseProvidedThat" tag is a problem: of the seven images so tagged, two of them had decidedly non-free "provided that" clauses, forbidding modification and commercial use.
This holds with what I've seen... the majority of the "CopyrightedFreeUseProvidedThat" images that I've seen are not free (some are "provided that this image not be used for commercial use"!) -- enough so that I wonder if it wouldn't be better to get rid of the template altogether and ask the copyright holders of the other images to license under CC-BY.
A similar situation existed with the plain "CopyrightedFreeUse" tag due to its vague wording, which is why I've been gradually deprecating it and recommending the more explicit "NoRightsReserved" tag instead. The "...ProvidedThat" tag at least has the virtue that we _know_ anything tagged with it has extra conditions that need to be checked.
Perhaps we should add a "CopyrightedFreeUseWithAttribution" tag to cover the most common legitimate case, and then go through the rest with a fine comb? Not sure what such a tag would gain over CC-BY, though, except that some people may simple be categorically opposed to CC.
On 3/8/06, Ilmari Karonen nospam@vyznev.net wrote:
Kat Walsh wrote:
On 3/8/06, Mark Wagner carnildo@gmail.com wrote:
The "CopyrightedFreeUseProvidedThat" tag is a problem: of the seven images so tagged, two of them had decidedly non-free "provided that" clauses, forbidding modification and commercial use.
This holds with what I've seen... the majority of the "CopyrightedFreeUseProvidedThat" images that I've seen are not free (some are "provided that this image not be used for commercial use"!) -- enough so that I wonder if it wouldn't be better to get rid of the template altogether and ask the copyright holders of the other images to license under CC-BY.
Perhaps we should add a "CopyrightedFreeUseWithAttribution" tag to cover the most common legitimate case, and then go through the rest with a fine comb? Not sure what such a tag would gain over CC-BY, though, except that some people may simple be categorically opposed to CC.
{{Attribution}} already exists. It's marked as deprecated in favor of {{cc-by}}, though.
-- Mark [[User:Carnildo]]
On 3/8/06, Mark Wagner carnildo@gmail.com wrote:
{{Attribution}} already exists. It's marked as deprecated in favor of {{cc-by}}, though.
I'm not sure I agree with that, or with any other attempt to force Creative Commons licenses on people. If people choose to actually license under CC, that's one thing. To make uploaders PRETEND the image copyright holder licensed under CC when they did not, but just said 'Free for use as long as you credit me' is quite wrong, IMO.
-Matt
On 08/03/06, Ilmari Karonen nospam@vyznev.net wrote:
Perhaps we should add a "CopyrightedFreeUseWithAttribution" tag to cover the most common legitimate case, and then go through the rest with a fine comb? Not sure what such a tag would gain over CC-BY, though, except that some people may simple be categorically opposed to CC.
You'd need both, regardless. Whilst it may have a functional equivalence to a CC-BY license, it'd be very, very legally dubious to claim that this meant it got released under the CC-BY license!
-- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk
On 8 Mar 2006, at 08:11, Mark Wagner wrote:
To get an idea as to what sort of image tagging is currently being used, I did a survey of the license tags applied to the 2000 most recent images uploaded (which represents about 24 hours and 20 minutes of uploading). Of those images, 134 were duplicate uploads or otherwise not accounted for, leaving 1,866 images to check for tags. The detailed results are at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Carnildo/upload_stats
Very useful.
So every day we get about 1200 pages of non free content added to wikipedia.
Call it 350,000 pages a year, assuming the rate is not increasing.
This is shameful, utterly and totally. It must stop.
This has been going on for far too long, and there has been no real progress.
We should stop all uploads of images now; free stuff can go to commons, so that we stop the increase: we have hundreds of thousands of old images to deal with. Its one setting on the software, we might need to get a bunch of admins to become commons admins to cope with the extra load there.
If there is no will to deal with it, forking en is the only other option.
Justinc
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1
Justin Cormack stated for the record:
If there is no will to deal with it, forking en is the only other option.
Justinc
I wish you fair winds, following seas, and the best of luck!
- -- Sean Barrett | Give a person a fish and you feed them for sean@epoptic.org | a day; teach a person to edit Wikipedia | and they won't bother you for months.
On Wed, 8 Mar 2006 14:32:35 +0000, you wrote:
If there is no will to deal with it, forking en is the only other option.
You'll need at least one box of floppy disks. Guy (JzG)
On 8 Mar 2006, at 15:03, Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:
On Wed, 8 Mar 2006 14:32:35 +0000, you wrote:
If there is no will to deal with it, forking en is the only other option.
You'll need at least one box of floppy disks. Guy (JzG)
No, only half a box, once the non free stuff is removed.
I was wondering, there is an organisation called the Wikimedia Foundation that might be interested in hosting a free encyclopaedia, they seem to host quite a lot of them, and just the one non free one.
Justinc
On Wed, 8 Mar 2006 15:06:03 +0000, you wrote:
I was wondering, there is an organisation called the Wikimedia Foundation that might be interested in hosting a free encyclopaedia, they seem to host quite a lot of them, and just the one non free one.
<accent=Scottish>Free, you say? Happen that will do quite nicely...</accent> Guy (JzG)
Justin Cormack wrote:
We should stop all uploads of images now; free stuff can go to commons, so that we stop the increase: we have hundreds of thousands of old images to deal with. Its one setting on the software, we might need to get a bunch of admins to become commons admins to cope with the extra load there.
Not to spread too much FUD about an ongoing debate, but a flaw with the "use commons for all free images" theory is that a number of commoners consider that German "design rights" laws mean that nearly all pictures of designed objects, such as toys or furniture, are not free, and that as a consequence most interior shots are not free either. (Outdoors pics are covered by the "Panoramafreiheit" exception.) There is also a problem with pre-1923 things marked "PD-US" that are not necessarily PD worldwide.
Image licensing is a hard issue that cannot be resolved with simple solutions.
Stan
On 8 Mar 2006, at 16:24, Stan Shebs wrote:
Justin Cormack wrote:
We should stop all uploads of images now; free stuff can go to commons, so that we stop the increase: we have hundreds of thousands of old images to deal with. Its one setting on the software, we might need to get a bunch of admins to become commons admins to cope with the extra load there.
Not to spread too much FUD about an ongoing debate, but a flaw with the "use commons for all free images" theory is that a number of commoners consider that German "design rights" laws mean that nearly all pictures of designed objects, such as toys or furniture, are not free, and that as a consequence most interior shots are not free either. (Outdoors pics are covered by the "Panoramafreiheit" exception.) There is also a problem with pre-1923 things marked "PD-US" that are not necessarily PD worldwide.
Image licensing is a hard issue that cannot be resolved with simple solutions.
I was only suggesting this as an interim solution. We dont have processes that can deal with 1000 non free images a day, or the tens or hundreds of thousands in the backlog. Turn off images upload until we have fixed it (leave it on far admins perhaps).
Justinc
On 3/8/06, Stan Shebs shebs@apple.com wrote:
Not to spread too much FUD about an ongoing debate, but a flaw with the "use commons for all free images" theory is that a number of commoners consider that German "design rights" laws mean that nearly all pictures of designed objects, such as toys or furniture, are not free, and that as a consequence most interior shots are not free either. (Outdoors pics are covered by the "Panoramafreiheit" exception.) There is also a problem with pre-1923 things marked "PD-US" that are not necessarily PD worldwide.
Personally, I ignore the latter and freely upload pre-1923 US-sourced images to Commons on a regular basis and have had nobody question this. Images for which the copyright was held by a corporation, not an individual, are likely to be free in most countries worldwide in any case (since then date of publication or creation is the deciding factor, not a death date).
As to the former, IMO, there are two aspects:
Firstly, that design rights laws are separate from copyright per se and are more like trademark law. We do not exclude images based on trademark law alone, even though the appearance of a trademark in an image may render it unusable for certain commercial uses, e.g. advertising of other products. Design rights laws I've seen, and I believe the German one is similar, are intended to prohibit other companies from producing 'knock-off' designs, not to prohibit photographs that happen to have such objects in them. We should not let paranoia over other restrictive laws concern us too much.
Are there actual German legal cases in which the appearance of objects over which design-rights laws apply appearing in a photograph have caused a lawsuit, let alone a successful one?
(any pointers to where on Commons this was discussed, since I missed it?)
Secondly, I do not think that one country's peculiar restrictive law should remove things from Commons; in theory, once one rounded up every country's odd laws, nothing could be left.
-Matt
Matt Brown wrote:
On 3/8/06, Stan Shebs shebs@apple.com wrote:
Not to spread too much FUD about an ongoing debate, but a flaw with the "use commons for all free images" theory is that a number of commoners consider that German "design rights" laws mean that nearly all pictures of designed objects, such as toys or furniture, are not free, and that as a consequence most interior shots are not free either. (Outdoors pics are covered by the "Panoramafreiheit" exception.) There is also a problem with pre-1923 things marked "PD-US" that are not necessarily PD worldwide.
Personally, I ignore the latter and freely upload pre-1923 US-sourced images to Commons on a regular basis and have had nobody question this. Images for which the copyright was held by a corporation, not an individual, are likely to be free in most countries worldwide in any case (since then date of publication or creation is the deciding factor, not a death date).
As to the former, IMO, there are two aspects:
Firstly, that design rights laws are separate from copyright per se and are more like trademark law. We do not exclude images based on trademark law alone, even though the appearance of a trademark in an image may render it unusable for certain commercial uses, e.g. advertising of other products. Design rights laws I've seen, and I believe the German one is similar, are intended to prohibit other companies from producing 'knock-off' designs, not to prohibit photographs that happen to have such objects in them. We should not let paranoia over other restrictive laws concern us too much.
Are there actual German legal cases in which the appearance of objects over which design-rights laws apply appearing in a photograph have caused a lawsuit, let alone a successful one?
(any pointers to where on Commons this was discussed, since I missed it?)
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/commons-l/2006-March/000155.html
Secondly, I do not think that one country's peculiar restrictive law should remove things from Commons; in theory, once one rounded up every country's odd laws, nothing could be left.
I agree. You'd have thought that the EU would have unified their copyright laws by now...
On 08/03/06, Stan Shebs shebs@apple.com wrote:
There is also a problem with pre-1923 things marked "PD-US" that are not necessarily PD worldwide.
Most PD-Art tagging, as well, relies on a relatively unusual provision of US copyright law (indeed, a provision made by a court case) which isn't a direct match for foreign legislation. Hum.
-- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk
On 3/9/06, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
On 08/03/06, Stan Shebs shebs@apple.com wrote:
There is also a problem with pre-1923 things marked "PD-US" that are not necessarily PD worldwide.
Most PD-Art tagging, as well, relies on a relatively unusual provision of US copyright law (indeed, a provision made by a court case) which isn't a direct match for foreign legislation. Hum.
Decided by a court case BUT fairly obvious from the US constitution and copyright law as worded. Copyright is, in the US, only valid for creative expression; thus, there is no such thing as 'mechanical copyright' in the US as in other nations.
-Matt
Mark Wagner wrote:
To get an idea as to what sort of image tagging is currently being used, I did a survey of the license tags applied to the 2000 most recent images uploaded (which represents about 24 hours and 20 minutes of uploading). Of those images, 134 were duplicate uploads or otherwise not accounted for, leaving 1,866 images to check for tags. The detailed results are at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Carnildo/upload_stats
For 1,866 images uploaded, 2,014 license tags were applied:
745 images were tagged as some sort of "fair use". The vast majority used one of the boilerplate templates, with most of the images being tagged as screenshots, covers, logos, and promotional images. Only 26 generic "fair use" tags were used, with most of them being "fair use in".
This is good news actually! Boilerplates can be handled en masse with tools as we improve our policy. It's the generic tags that require the one-by-one manual evaluation.
The "CopyrightedFreeUseProvidedThat" tag is a problem: of the seven images so tagged, two of them had decidedly non-free "provided that" clauses, forbidding modification and commercial use.
I wouldn't miss it if it were retired, it's just confusing.
It would be interesting to retain the list of images and then see what's happened to them a month from now. Empirically I've noticed that a lot of fair use images are uploaded for articles that are soon deleted, and are in turn deleted because they are orphans. I wouldn't be surprised if most of the day's non-free uploads were gone after a month or two.
Stan
On 3/8/06, Stan Shebs shebs@apple.com wrote:
Mark Wagner wrote:
To get an idea as to what sort of image tagging is currently being used, I did a survey of the license tags applied to the 2000 most recent images uploaded (which represents about 24 hours and 20 minutes of uploading). Of those images, 134 were duplicate uploads or otherwise not accounted for, leaving 1,866 images to check for tags. The detailed results are at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Carnildo/upload_stats
For 1,866 images uploaded, 2,014 license tags were applied:
745 images were tagged as some sort of "fair use". The vast majority used one of the boilerplate templates, with most of the images being tagged as screenshots, covers, logos, and promotional images. Only 26 generic "fair use" tags were used, with most of them being "fair use in".
This is good news actually! Boilerplates can be handled en masse with tools as we improve our policy. It's the generic tags that require the one-by-one manual evaluation.
The only tag that can be handled completely automatically is {{fairusein}} -- such images can be removed from any article they don't have a tag for. All the other tags require human evaluation to decide if the tag is applied correctly ({{promophoto}} and {{promotional}} are frequently applied to any image found on official or fan websites) and decide if the image is being used in a way that the template allows.
It would be interesting to retain the list of images and then see what's happened to them a month from now. Empirically I've noticed that a lot of fair use images are uploaded for articles that are soon deleted, and are in turn deleted because they are orphans. I wouldn't be surprised if most of the day's non-free uploads were gone after a month or two.
I've got the list. The problem is that my program collecting the statistics didn't distinguish between deleted images and those with blank image description pages. I noticed that the images with more...interesting...titles (Image:Hentai - Pokemon - May, Misty & Ash (1) (1).jpg, anyone?) tended to be deleted quickly, though.
-- Mark [[User:Carnildo]]
On 3/8/06, Stan Shebs shebs@apple.com wrote:
Mark Wagner wrote:
To get an idea as to what sort of image tagging is currently being used, I did a survey of the license tags applied to the 2000 most recent images uploaded (which represents about 24 hours and 20 minutes of uploading). Of those images, 134 were duplicate uploads or otherwise not accounted for, leaving 1,866 images to check for tags. The detailed results are at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Carnildo/upload_stats
For 1,866 images uploaded, 2,014 license tags were applied:
745 images were tagged as some sort of "fair use". The vast majority used one of the boilerplate templates, with most of the images being tagged as screenshots, covers, logos, and promotional images. Only 26 generic "fair use" tags were used, with most of them being "fair use in".
This is good news actually! Boilerplates can be handled en masse with tools as we improve our policy. It's the generic tags that require the one-by-one manual evaluation.
Boilerplates can only be handled en masse if the images are tagged correctly. From what I've seen, there are a whole lot of boilerplated images which are not tagged correctly.
Anthony