http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Anthere#Image:Norbert3.jpg_listed_for...
Norbert was a much appreciated wikipedian on the french wikipedia. He contributed a lot. Wikipedia is not produced by machines. But by living beings. We should value people and we should value good contributors.
Norbert died some time ago. It was the first wikipedian we lost on the french project. At that point, he was the editor with the largest number of edits. And it was not only typos. He left us a last word just before he had an operation and did not survive it.
We sent flowers to his burial. We told his family how important he was for us and they were proud of what he did for Wikipedia. A text was written about him. And for some reasons, it was translated on the english signpost http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2005-10-10/News_an....
I uploaded the picture of Treanna on the english wikipedia. It was the picture he had on his user page. A bad image, but the only one we had for him. Certainly an image which will never be reused by anyone. But an image of Treanna.
The crime : it was uploaded as a non-derivative license. So, it is proposed for deletion.
And frankly, I can not ask Treanna any more if he would be nice enough to change that license to make it free by wikipedia definition.
--------
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deceased_Wikipedians
This page is also part of our history. People matter. Please do not delete editors pictures because they uploaded an image of them under a non-derivative licence. please try to find the balance between dogma and wikilove.
Anthere
On 7/26/06, Anthere Anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
I uploaded the picture of Treanna on the english wikipedia. It was the picture he had on his user page. A bad image, but the only one we had for him. Certainly an image which will never be reused by anyone. But an image of Treanna.
The crime : it was uploaded as a non-derivative license. So, it is proposed for deletion.
And frankly, I can not ask Treanna any more if he would be nice enough to change that license to make it free by wikipedia definition.
Is it not, theoretically speaking, possible for someone just to assert ownership of it, and upload it under public domain? They can take full responsibility for any (highly unlikely) challenge to their ownership of it coming from the family or estate or whatever?
(but in any case, yes, this is a sad situation)
Steve
On 7/26/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 7/26/06, Anthere Anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
I uploaded the picture of Treanna on the english wikipedia. It was the picture he had on his user page. A bad image, but the only one we had for him. Certainly an image which will never be reused by anyone. But an image of Treanna.
The crime : it was uploaded as a non-derivative license. So, it is proposed for deletion.
And frankly, I can not ask Treanna any more if he would be nice enough to change that license to make it free by wikipedia definition.
Is it not, theoretically speaking, possible for someone just to assert ownership of it, and upload it under public domain? They can take full responsibility for any (highly unlikely) challenge to their ownership of it coming from the family or estate or whatever?
(but in any case, yes, this is a sad situation)
Steve
I'd sooner make the (somewhat suspect) claim of fair use - after all, it's an article about the subject, etc.
On 7/26/06, Guettarda guettarda@gmail.com wrote:
On 7/26/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 7/26/06, Anthere Anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
I uploaded the picture of Treanna on the english wikipedia. It was the picture he had on his user page. A bad image, but the only one we had for him. Certainly an image which will never be reused by anyone. But an image of Treanna.
The crime : it was uploaded as a non-derivative license. So, it is proposed for deletion.
And frankly, I can not ask Treanna any more if he would be nice enough to change that license to make it free by wikipedia definition.
Is it not, theoretically speaking, possible for someone just to assert ownership of it, and upload it under public domain? They can take full responsibility for any (highly unlikely) challenge to their ownership of it coming from the family or estate or whatever?
(but in any case, yes, this is a sad situation)
Steve
I'd sooner make the (somewhat suspect) claim of fair use - after all, it's an article about the subject, etc.
In thoery you could ask his estate but they might be difficult to get hold of.
On 7/26/06, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 7/26/06, Guettarda guettarda@gmail.com wrote:
On 7/26/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
Is it not, theoretically speaking, possible for someone just to assert ownership of it, and upload it under public domain? They can take full responsibility for any (highly unlikely) challenge to their ownership of it coming from the family or estate or whatever?
(but in any case, yes, this is a sad situation)
Steve
I'd sooner make the (somewhat suspect) claim of fair use - after all, it's an article about the subject, etc.
In thoery you could ask his estate but they might be difficult to get hold of.
-- geni
I think you are all missing Antheres point. Who cares whether it's fair use or not? Do we really have to be so anal about the rules that we will infact bring this to IfD, instead of just quietly ignoring the copyright issue in this very special unique case. We are people, for christs sake, not automatons! Sometimes, process is not that important.
--Oskar
Except when process protects us from (potentially lenghty and costly) legal proceedings. Without a tag, it is not clear whether we have the right to even host the image.
Sincerely, Silas Snider (en:User:Simonfairfax)
On 7/26/06, Oskar Sigvardsson oskarsigvardsson@gmail.com wrote:
On 7/26/06, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 7/26/06, Guettarda guettarda@gmail.com wrote:
On 7/26/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
Is it not, theoretically speaking, possible for someone just to assert ownership of it, and upload it under public domain? They can take full responsibility for any (highly unlikely) challenge to their ownership of it coming from the family or estate or whatever?
(but in any case, yes, this is a sad situation)
Steve
I'd sooner make the (somewhat suspect) claim of fair use - after all, it's an article about the subject, etc.
In thoery you could ask his estate but they might be difficult to get hold of.
-- geni
I think you are all missing Antheres point. Who cares whether it's fair use or not? Do we really have to be so anal about the rules that we will infact bring this to IfD, instead of just quietly ignoring the copyright issue in this very special unique case. We are people, for christs sake, not automatons! Sometimes, process is not that important.
--Oskar _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
On 7/27/06, Silas Snider swsnider@gmail.com wrote:
Except when process protects us from (potentially lenghty and costly) legal proceedings. Without a tag, it is not clear whether we have the right to even host the image.
Legaly? Fine can't host modifications of it which causes the problem.
Silas Snider wrote:
Except when process protects us from (potentially lenghty and costly) legal proceedings. Without a tag, it is not clear whether we have the right to even host the image.
It would be nice if people who put up these claims about protecting us had half a clue about what they are saying. Such legal proceedings are always possible no matter what we do. So too is winning the big prize in a national lottery. If you sign a binding agreement to donate 50% of that prize to WMF when you win it, I would suggest that the Board not make that eventuality a prominent part of its future plans.
Ec
On 7/27/06, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Silas Snider wrote:
Except when process protects us from (potentially lenghty and costly) legal proceedings. Without a tag, it is not clear whether we have the right to even host the image.
It would be nice if people who put up these claims about protecting us had half a clue about what they are saying. Such legal proceedings are always possible no matter what we do. So too is winning the big prize in a national lottery. If you sign a binding agreement to donate 50% of that prize to WMF when you win it, I would suggest that the Board not make that eventuality a prominent part of its future plans.
Of course, it's always possible to be sued no matter what we do... thus we should not do anything to decrease the probability of lawsuit! It's all so simple!
On a more serious note... It does make sense to permit some things which will never be a risk or a problem. The problem is that with thousands of users, for any instance there is someone who doesn't see a problem with it. My favorite, although old, example is Raul654 arguing that a cover recording of [[Alanis Morissette]]s Ironic [[Ironic (song)]] was public domain.
As a result, we can't simple accept all members of the community carrying the ability to make exceptions. To me this seems like a hard problem.
I oppose this image being claimed as fair use on English Wikipedia in the Wikipedia: namespace. I'd rather a {{Because Erik Said So}} template be created, if we're going to grant Erik the ability to unilateral ignore our requirements for image in the Wikipedia namespace. It is important that in the process of allowing exceptions for obviously harmless things that we do not undo the work of others who have worked so hard to keep unacceptable material out. The unfree image of Tim Starling we hosted on his user page easily caused months of additional work in reducing unfree images in userspace because it was frequently cited as a counter example, prolonging uncomfortable disagreements.
Of course this is not a matter of legal peril... it is, rather, a matter of commitment to our goal of free content. I hope that when I die no one insults my contribution to Wikipedia by increasing the number of non-free images we have by uploading non-free images of me to all our projects, especially ones where my only interactions were interlanguage links.
Gregory Maxwell wrote:
On 7/27/06, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Silas Snider wrote:
Except when process protects us from (potentially lenghty and costly) legal proceedings. Without a tag, it is not clear whether we have the right to even host the image.
It would be nice if people who put up these claims about protecting us had half a clue about what they are saying. Such legal proceedings are always possible no matter what we do. So too is winning the big prize in a national lottery. If you sign a binding agreement to donate 50% of that prize to WMF when you win it, I would suggest that the Board not make that eventuality a prominent part of its future plans.
Of course, it's always possible to be sued no matter what we do... thus we should not do anything to decrease the probability of lawsuit! It's all so simple!
Decreasing the probability of a lawsuit is certainly appropriate. The question is more one of at what probability level does the law of diminishing returns set in.
On a more serious note... It does make sense to permit some things which will never be a risk or a problem. The problem is that with thousands of users, for any instance there is someone who doesn't see a problem with it. My favorite, although old, example is Raul654 arguing that a cover recording of [[Alanis Morissette]]s Ironic [[Ironic (song)]] was public domain.
Permissive as my views may be, that would not extend to making a PD claim unless it was based on facts.
As a result, we can't simple accept all members of the community carrying the ability to make exceptions. To me this seems like a hard problem.
It depends on what kind of exception. It would probably be yes when it's a question of a picture of one's own self. Beyond that, a rationale based on some knowledge of law and facts should be a mandatory precondition in most cases.
I oppose this image being claimed as fair use on English Wikipedia in the Wikipedia: namespace. I'd rather a {{Because Erik Said So}} template be created, if we're going to grant Erik the ability to unilateral ignore our requirements for image in the Wikipedia namespace.
I don't see "Because X said so" as an acceptable fair use rationale.
It is important that in the process of allowing exceptions for obviously harmless things that we do not undo the work of others who have worked so hard to keep unacceptable material out.
Policies can change. The nature of what we call "free" can change. You win some; you lose some. There is no need for them to take this personally.
The unfree image of Tim Starling we hosted on his user page easily caused months of additional work in reducing unfree images in userspace because it was frequently cited as a counter example, prolonging uncomfortable disagreements.
I didn't participate in that discussion, but I'm sure that his opinion on that should have been highly influential.
Of course this is not a matter of legal peril... it is, rather, a matter of commitment to our goal of free content. I hope that when I die no one insults my contribution to Wikipedia by increasing the number of non-free images we have by uploading non-free images of me to all our projects, especially ones where my only interactions were interlanguage links.
You won't be in a position to complain.
On 7/27/06, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Silas Snider wrote:
Except when process protects us from (potentially lenghty and costly) legal proceedings. Without a tag, it is not clear whether we have the right to even host the image.
It would be nice if people who put up these claims about protecting us had half a clue about what they are saying. Such legal proceedings are always possible no matter what we do. So too is winning the big prize in a national lottery. If you sign a binding agreement to donate 50% of that prize to WMF when you win it, I would suggest that the Board not make that eventuality a prominent part of its future plans.
Ec
I'd like to think I have at least half a clue, having seen loads of "you are using my copyrighted material, take it down or else" messages. (And then many more "hey, I wrote this press release, and you guys called me a copyright violator, take that down immediately." You just can't win.)
Most of them are just angry and will never actually go to the trouble of a lawsuit, sure. Some of them might. Considering the volume, not many of them would have to for it to be a huge waste of the limited resources of WMF. It's *possible* for people to attempt to sue us for all sorts of frivolous things even if we take as much care as possible, yes, but it's not the wisest course of action to invite it where we don't need to by failing to be responsible.
However:
In this case, there must be some sort of special case. Purist though I generally am, surely there must be some way to hang on to a few pictures of deceased editors and tag them appropriately to make their status clear. Considering all the copyright issues on the project, it would be a happy day if this were the most pressing of them. I would be loath for this to be some sort of precedent so that everyone and his dog wants an excuse to be a special case, but, well, really, I am OK with this particular image.
-Kat
On 7/27/06, Kat Walsh mindspillage@gmail.com wrote:
In this case, there must be some sort of special case. Purist though I generally am, surely there must be some way to hang on to a few pictures of deceased editors and tag them appropriately to make their status clear. Considering all the copyright issues on the project, it would be a happy day if this were the most pressing of them. I would be loath for this to be some sort of precedent so that everyone and his dog wants an excuse to be a special case, but, well, really, I am OK with this particular image.
Why don't we come up with a "special case" template? "This image is copyrighted, and cannot be used under fair use. However, the Wikipedia community has decided that in this special case, it is worth breaching the copyright anyway".
Steve
On 7/27/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 7/27/06, Kat Walsh mindspillage@gmail.com wrote:
In this case, there must be some sort of special case. Purist though I generally am, surely there must be some way to hang on to a few pictures of deceased editors and tag them appropriately to make their status clear. Considering all the copyright issues on the project, it would be a happy day if this were the most pressing of them. I would be loath for this to be some sort of precedent so that everyone and his dog wants an excuse to be a special case, but, well, really, I am OK with this particular image.
Why don't we come up with a "special case" template? "This image is copyrighted, and cannot be used under fair use. However, the Wikipedia community has decided that in this special case, it is worth breaching the copyright anyway".
Steve
Because it risks being overused.
On 7/28/06, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
Because it risks being overused.
Maybe, but "it risks..." is rarely a good reason not to try something with no negative consequences.
Steve
On 7/28/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
Maybe, but "it risks..." is rarely a good reason not to try something with no negative consequences.
Steve
I has negative consequences. It makes the project less free. We've already got enough problems with people ignoreing copyright. We don't need any more.
On 7/28/06, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
I has negative consequences. It makes the project less free. We've already got enough problems with people ignoreing copyright. We don't need any more.
Allowing a mechanism whereby people can explicitly state that for once they are consciously ignoring copyright, based on consensus achieved with a wide group of other users does not sound like the top of a slippery slope to me. Nor does it sound irreversible.
But there you go.
Steve
On 7/28/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
Allowing a mechanism whereby people can explicitly state that for once they are consciously ignoring copyright,
We already de facto have that.
based on consensus achieved with a wide group of other users
I wasn't aware that consensus had anything to do with copyright
does not sound like the top of a slippery slope to me.
Past experce suggests that there are plenty of times where almost all the users who care about an image want to use it in spite of it being a copyvio. I do not need people being able to point to exceptions.
This discussion is boring to death. Seriously.
On 7/28/06, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
I wasn't aware that consensus had anything to do with copyright
I'm proposing a change to the status quo, whereby a *broad* consensus (hopefully with some clueful people) can "overrule copyright".
Probably these situations are still best dealt with by one person taking responsibility for the "copyright violation" and uploading the image under their name.
Steve
Steve Bennett wrote:
On 7/27/06, Kat Walsh mindspillage@gmail.com wrote:
In this case, there must be some sort of special case. Purist though I generally am, surely there must be some way to hang on to a few pictures of deceased editors and tag them appropriately to make their status clear. Considering all the copyright issues on the project, it would be a happy day if this were the most pressing of them. I would be loath for this to be some sort of precedent so that everyone and his dog wants an excuse to be a special case, but, well, really, I am OK with this particular image.
Why don't we come up with a "special case" template? "This image is copyrighted, and cannot be used under fair use. However, the Wikipedia community has decided that in this special case, it is worth breaching the copyright anyway".
That wording, especially the last bit, could even make their case for wilfullness. ;-) Even a public interest argument would be better than that.
Ec
Kat Walsh wrote:
On 7/27/06, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Silas Snider wrote:
Except when process protects us from (potentially lenghty and costly) legal proceedings. Without a tag, it is not clear whether we have the right to even host the image.
It would be nice if people who put up these claims about protecting us had half a clue about what they are saying. Such legal proceedings are always possible no matter what we do. So too is winning the big prize in a national lottery. If you sign a binding agreement to donate 50% of that prize to WMF when you win it, I would suggest that the Board not make that eventuality a prominent part of its future plans.
Ec
I'd like to think I have at least half a clue, having seen loads of "you are using my copyrighted material, take it down or else" messages. (And then many more "hey, I wrote this press release, and you guys called me a copyright violator, take that down immediately." You just can't win.)
Most of them are just angry and will never actually go to the trouble of a lawsuit, sure. Some of them might. Considering the volume, not many of them would have to for it to be a huge waste of the limited resources of WMF. It's *possible* for people to attempt to sue us for all sorts of frivolous things even if we take as much care as possible, yes, but it's not the wisest course of action to invite it where we don't need to by failing to be responsible.
However:
In this case, there must be some sort of special case. Purist though I generally am, surely there must be some way to hang on to a few pictures of deceased editors and tag them appropriately to make their status clear. Considering all the copyright issues on the project, it would be a happy day if this were the most pressing of them. I would be loath for this to be some sort of precedent so that everyone and his dog wants an excuse to be a special case, but, well, really, I am OK with this particular image.
-Kat
Just a thought... Dismiss it if that sounds stupid.
I suppose only a minority of you guys have known wikipedia before there were user pages (within a user space). In the old wiki, there was no user space. Someone could have a user name and no page associated with it. As long as the wiki was small, no one really needed a private place to communicate. There was even no equivalent to the village pump. We just discussed on talk pages. And when a wiki has 5 modifications per day, it is not an issue to follow your own discussions :-)
Then, people started having their own page. It was easier to communicate with other editors, when the community started growing. Of course, there was no user space, so user articles... were encyclopedic articles. I remember when I created my user page... [[anthere]]. It was also a french word, so my user page was sitting at an article place :-)
But do you know why user pages are really necessary ? Not really to communicate. In a collective project, it is important to keep some private space for each individual. A place where they can blow steam. Where they can make their own personnality more important than the collective. Where they matter as individuals. On projects with rules such as NPOV, it is also highly suitable to offer a space for people to express a POV.
The need for that space was quickly recognised. It was identified and separated from the encyclopedia. In a recurrent fashion, we observe issues about user images. These user images actually ARE in the encyclopedic space. Why ? Why could not they be separated in the user space just as user pages ? NPOV is a very strict rule of Wikipedia and still, we do allow opinions to be expressed on user pages. Why could not user images be stored separately from encyclopedic images ?
ant
Kat Walsh wrote:
On 7/27/06, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Silas Snider wrote:
Except when process protects us from (potentially lenghty and costly) legal proceedings. Without a tag, it is not clear whether we have the right to even host the image.
It would be nice if people who put up these claims about protecting us had half a clue about what they are saying. Such legal proceedings are always possible no matter what we do. So too is winning the big prize in a national lottery. If you sign a binding agreement to donate 50% of that prize to WMF when you win it, I would suggest that the Board not make that eventuality a prominent part of its future plans.
Ec
I'd like to think I have at least half a clue, having seen loads of "you are using my copyrighted material, take it down or else" messages. (And then many more "hey, I wrote this press release, and you guys called me a copyright violator, take that down immediately." You just can't win.)
When such a request is made it does need to be investigated. Sometimes that claim will be untenable. A while back we had a complaint from someone who claimed that a picture of a deposed 1920s Saudi king was taken from his website. The king died a few years later in Iraq. It could be easily established with reference to Saudi and Iraqi law that the picture was in the public domain, and that our complainer had no claim to copyright. Does it make sense to accede in these baseless circumstances. If the person has a sensible case we should take it down, or if some individual Wikipedian wants to defend the inclusion we should ask for a formal takedown order with which we will comply.
In your second example we should not be making public accusations that someone is in fact a copyright violator. Public discussion of these situations should only speek of possible copyvios that are under investigations. Outright direct accusations could open up a whole different kettle of problems.. We should also pursue wilful breaches of licence more aggresively.
Most of them are just angry and will never actually go to the trouble of a lawsuit, sure. Some of them might. Considering the volume, not many of them would have to for it to be a huge waste of the limited resources of WMF. It's *possible* for people to attempt to sue us for all sorts of frivolous things even if we take as much care as possible, yes, but it's not the wisest course of action to invite it where we don't need to by failing to be responsible.
Allowing a person to continue with his frivolous suit is not a failure of responsibility. Incurring enormous legal costs on a case that at a state level would belong in small claims court is not cost effective. If the suit is for serious money and frivolous, costs would be recoverable.
However:
In this case, there must be some sort of special case. Purist though I generally am, surely there must be some way to hang on to a few pictures of deceased editors and tag them appropriately to make their status clear. Considering all the copyright issues on the project, it would be a happy day if this were the most pressing of them. I would be loath for this to be some sort of precedent so that everyone and his dog wants an excuse to be a special case, but, well, really, I am OK with this particular image.
Any dog that actually wrot a Wikipedia article would be a special case. :-)
Ec
On 7/26/06, Oskar Sigvardsson oskarsigvardsson@gmail.com wrote:
I think you are all missing Antheres point. Who cares whether it's fair use or not? Do we really have to be so anal about the rules that we will infact bring this to IfD, instead of just quietly ignoring the copyright issue in this very special unique case. We are people, for christs sake, not automatons! Sometimes, process is not that important.
--Oskar
I don't see why it's such a special unique case. Wikipedia's copyright policies are flawed, and this is one example of it.
By the way, isn't there a rule that fair use only applies in articles?
Anthony
On 7/27/06, Anthony wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
On 7/26/06, Oskar Sigvardsson oskarsigvardsson@gmail.com wrote:
I think you are all missing Antheres point. Who cares whether it's fair use or not? Do we really have to be so anal about the rules that we will infact bring this to IfD, instead of just quietly ignoring the copyright issue in this very special unique case. We are people, for christs sake, not automatons! Sometimes, process is not that important.
--Oskar
I don't see why it's such a special unique case. Wikipedia's copyright policies are flawed, and this is one example of it.
By the way, isn't there a rule that fair use only applies in articles?
Am I missing something here? The image in the fr-wikipedia is under CreativeCommons, and this was made by the owner of the copyright, Treanna himself [ http://fr.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Image:Norbert3.jpg&diff=239605...]. Doesn't mean that the image on en-wikipedia also counts as CreativeCommons?
(that's diving right back into the process part of this whole thing, though)
--DP
On 7/27/06, Death Phoenix originaldeathphoenix@gmail.com wrote:
On 7/27/06, Anthony wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
On 7/26/06, Oskar Sigvardsson oskarsigvardsson@gmail.com wrote:
I think you are all missing Antheres point. Who cares whether it's fair use or not? Do we really have to be so anal about the rules that we will infact bring this to IfD, instead of just quietly ignoring the copyright issue in this very special unique case. We are people, for christs sake, not automatons! Sometimes, process is not that important.
--Oskar
I don't see why it's such a special unique case. Wikipedia's copyright policies are flawed, and this is one example of it.
By the way, isn't there a rule that fair use only applies in articles?
Am I missing something here? The image in the fr-wikipedia is under CreativeCommons, and this was made by the owner of the copyright, Treanna himself [ http://fr.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Image:Norbert3.jpg&diff=239605...]. Doesn't mean that the image on en-wikipedia also counts as CreativeCommons?
(that's diving right back into the process part of this whole thing, though)
--DP
ND NoDerivs. Not a free enough lisence for wikipedia.
On 7/27/06, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 7/27/06, Death Phoenix originaldeathphoenix@gmail.com wrote:
On 7/27/06, Anthony wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
On 7/26/06, Oskar Sigvardsson oskarsigvardsson@gmail.com wrote:
I think you are all missing Antheres point. Who cares whether it's fair use or not? Do we really have to be so anal about the rules
that
we will infact bring this to IfD, instead of just quietly ignoring
the
copyright issue in this very special unique case. We are people, for christs sake, not automatons! Sometimes, process is not that important.
--Oskar
I don't see why it's such a special unique case. Wikipedia's copyright policies are flawed, and this is one example of it.
By the way, isn't there a rule that fair use only applies in articles?
Am I missing something here? The image in the fr-wikipedia is under CreativeCommons, and this was made by the owner of the copyright,
Treanna
himself [
http://fr.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Image:Norbert3.jpg&diff=239605... ].
Doesn't mean that the image on en-wikipedia also counts as
CreativeCommons?
(that's diving right back into the process part of this whole thing,
though)
--DP
ND NoDerivs. Not a free enough lisence for wikipedia.
Ah, yes, looking at the rest of the text in the image in the French page makes it clear. This leads to another question. What do we do when we can't get the original contributor's permission, apart from contacting his estate? I have to agree with Anthere in that this seems a little heartless. It's not like the Deceased Wikipedians page is meant for the encyclopedia, but rather, it's meant for the community.
On 7/27/06, Death Phoenix originaldeathphoenix@gmail.com wrote:
Ah, yes, looking at the rest of the text in the image in the French page makes it clear. This leads to another question. What do we do when we can't get the original contributor's permission, apart from contacting his estate?
It is unlikely that the situation will arise very often.
I have to agree with Anthere in that this seems a little heartless. It's not like the Deceased Wikipedians page is meant for the encyclopedia, but rather, it's meant for the community.
A seperate wikimedia memorial project would seem to be the logical answer.
On 7/27/06, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 7/27/06, Death Phoenix originaldeathphoenix@gmail.com wrote:
Ah, yes, looking at the rest of the text in the image in the French page makes it clear. This leads to another question. What do we do when we
can't
get the original contributor's permission, apart from contacting his
estate?
It is unlikely that the situation will arise very often.
I have to agree with Anthere in that this seems a little heartless. It's
not
like the Deceased Wikipedians page is meant for the encyclopedia, but rather, it's meant for the community.
A seperate wikimedia memorial project would seem to be the logical answer.
A decent idea, though such a memorial project would (hopefully) be small, confined to just a few pages.
Death Phoenix wrote:
On 7/27/06, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 7/27/06, Death Phoenix originaldeathphoenix@gmail.com wrote:
I have to agree with Anthere in that this seems a little heartless. It's not like the Deceased Wikipedians page is meant for the encyclopedia, but rather, it's meant for the community.
A seperate wikimedia memorial project would seem to be the logical answer.
A decent idea, though such a memorial project would (hopefully) be small, confined to just a few pages.
We already have Meta, don't we?
The current policy on Meta seems to be to only allow GFDL uploads, though a quick look at the image list suggest it's not followed very strictly. But would there actually be any reason not to allow non-free images on Meta _if_ they are on-topic; such as, say, photos of deceased Wikipedians?
Death Phoenix wrote:
On 7/27/06, Anthony wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
On 7/26/06, Oskar Sigvardsson oskarsigvardsson@gmail.com wrote:
I think you are all missing Antheres point. Who cares whether it's fair use or not? Do we really have to be so anal about the rules that we will infact bring this to IfD, instead of just quietly ignoring the copyright issue in this very special unique case. We are people, for christs sake, not automatons! Sometimes, process is not that important.
--Oskar
I don't see why it's such a special unique case. Wikipedia's copyright policies are flawed, and this is one example of it.
By the way, isn't there a rule that fair use only applies in articles?
Am I missing something here? The image in the fr-wikipedia is under CreativeCommons, and this was made by the owner of the copyright, Treanna himself [ http://fr.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Image:Norbert3.jpg&diff=239605...]. Doesn't mean that the image on en-wikipedia also counts as CreativeCommons?
(that's diving right back into the process part of this whole thing, though)
--DP
It certainly is under a creative commons license, but not allowing derivative. So, we claim fair use provision, to make it possible to host it, to do "just as if we could do derivatives". Of course it is unlikely we will ever make any derivative of this image and fair use is not recognised in France (Treanna was french).
But well...
That reminds me...
A few weeks ago, I got an image listed for deletion. It was under the gfdl licence. The argument to list it for deletion was that no author was mentionned. With no author specifically mentionned, it was argued that the validity of the status of the image could be questionned and no one could be contacted for check.
The good news is that even if no author was mentionned, someone could contact me to ask me :-)
(and someone nicely run a bot on my images to add to all of them an author name).
But seriously... is there a trend toward deletion of images under gfdl when the author name is missing ?
If so, would not you consider adding "fields" of information when uploading an image, and making them mandatory. For example, author name, date and place of shot etc...
Would not that make it easier as well to identify data when preparing a DVD ?
Anthere
On 7/28/06, Anthere Anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
But seriously... is there a trend toward deletion of images under gfdl when the author name is missing ?
if there isn't a source.
If so, would not you consider adding "fields" of information when uploading an image, and making them mandatory. For example, author name, date and place of shot etc...
No that makes it too easy to lie.
geni wrote:
On 7/28/06, Anthere Anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
But seriously... is there a trend toward deletion of images under gfdl when the author name is missing ?
if there isn't a source.
If so, would not you consider adding "fields" of information when uploading an image, and making them mandatory. For example, author name, date and place of shot etc...
No that makes it too easy to lie.
That's a blatant assumption of bad faith. I prefer to assume that most people are honest.
Ec
Anthere wrote:
But seriously... is there a trend toward deletion of images under gfdl when the author name is missing ?
If so, would not you consider adding "fields" of information when uploading an image, and making them mandatory. For example, author name, date and place of shot etc...
While there is a reasonable argument that can be made for including the copyright owner's name, there are times when asking for the name of the photographer makes no sense. This was the case when Adam asked a complete stranger to take his picture in front of a famous building.
The date of the shot should not be viewed as important. If I have an otherwise valid picture that I took about 20 years ago I have no idea of the date.
Ec
On 7/30/06, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
The date of the shot should not be viewed as important. If I have an otherwise valid picture that I took about 20 years ago I have no idea of the date.
Ec
It is nice to know. Likewise it is nice if people inform us when they die.
geni wrote:
On 7/30/06, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
The date of the shot should not be viewed as important. If I have an otherwise valid picture that I took about 20 years ago I have no idea of the date.
Ec
It is nice to know. Likewise it is nice if people inform us when they die.
Failing to announce one's death could be grounds for permanent banning. :-)
Ec
On 7/27/06, Oskar Sigvardsson oskarsigvardsson@gmail.com wrote:
I think you are all missing Antheres point. Who cares whether it's fair use or not?
Me
Do we really have to be so anal about the rules that we will infact bring this to IfD, instead of just quietly ignoring the copyright issue in this very special unique case.
Ah PUI would be another option. Or I could just point out is has't been in an article for 5 days and speedy it. However there are several tens of thousands of other copyvios in wikipedia. This one can wait.
We are people, for christs sake, not automatons!
And what has that got to do with anything?
Sometimes, process is not that important.
--Oskar
Nothing to do with process. If you want to create a memorial it might be better to start a seperate project with different rules simply to handle the multinational aspect.
On 7/27/06, Oskar Sigvardsson oskarsigvardsson@gmail.com wrote:
I think you are all missing Antheres point. Who cares whether it's fair use or not? Do we really have to be so anal about the rules that we will infact bring this to IfD, instead of just quietly ignoring the copyright issue in this very special unique case. We are people, for christs sake, not automatons! Sometimes, process is not that important.
Fair use is an extremely important exemption to copyright law. There are good reasons to prohibit it e.g. in the User: space, and to require users to upload their own works as free content. But there is no single good reason why a photo that is important to Wikipedia's history, and that cannot easily be obtained as free content, wouldn't qualify as fair use in the Wikipedia: namespace.
It's dogmatic thinking about these issues that is dangerous. But "quietly ignoring" doesn't solve the problem -- it only means that sooner or later it will come up again, either in this case or in another similar one. Not quietly ignoring it, but talking about it, to me demonstrates a greater sense of responsibility and empathy.
With that said: I think that our memorial page at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3ADeceased_Wikipedians demonstrates that there are a lot of people who do care about how we preserve the memory of Wikipedians who have passed on. Caring about knowledge, ultimately, is always caring about people. Because knowledge is nothing without the human beings who collect, derive, and use it -- and who, in doing so, always build upon the works of the generations who came before them. To honor the members of our own community therefore is a natural expression of the love of knowledge, and the love of humanity.
Erik
Erik Moeller wrote:
On 7/27/06, Oskar Sigvardsson oskarsigvardsson@gmail.com wrote:
I think you are all missing Antheres point. Who cares whether it's fair use or not? Do we really have to be so anal about the rules that we will infact bring this to IfD, instead of just quietly ignoring the copyright issue in this very special unique case. We are people, for christs sake, not automatons! Sometimes, process is not that important.
Fair use is an extremely important exemption to copyright law. There are good reasons to prohibit it e.g. in the User: space, and to require users to upload their own works as free content. But there is no single good reason why a photo that is important to Wikipedia's history, and that cannot easily be obtained as free content, wouldn't qualify as fair use in the Wikipedia: namespace.
It's dogmatic thinking about these issues that is dangerous. But "quietly ignoring" doesn't solve the problem -- it only means that sooner or later it will come up again, either in this case or in another similar one. Not quietly ignoring it, but talking about it, to me demonstrates a greater sense of responsibility and empathy.
With that said: I think that our memorial page at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3ADeceased_Wikipedians demonstrates that there are a lot of people who do care about how we preserve the memory of Wikipedians who have passed on. Caring about knowledge, ultimately, is always caring about people. Because knowledge is nothing without the human beings who collect, derive, and use it -- and who, in doing so, always build upon the works of the generations who came before them. To honor the members of our own community therefore is a natural expression of the love of knowledge, and the love of humanity.
I share these sentiments. Sometimes obeying the rules as they are written simply does not make sense. The text of the law may be in black and white, but it should not be read so as to prop up the illusion of certainty.
It's difficult to estimate how many deceased Wikipedians there really are, but I suspect there are far more than are represented on the cited page. We profit a lot from the imminently dying Wikipedians, the ones with long degenerative and terminal illnesses who at some point quietly stop editing for no apparent reason. Perhaps they are undergoing gruelling courses of chemotherapy or feeling the ravages of AIDS. To complain publicly would be a blow to their pride. Their health will not allow them a "real job". Maybe, for a while, they have one good hour each day and they want to feel useful rather than to spend that hour watching yet another mindless rerun on TV. So they edit a Wiki, and for doing that the reward is the feeling that they have done something useful. Conveniently, I just read this morning in Kenzaburo Oe's novel "Somersault": "When a person thinks about death or is actually facing death,if he's convinced that his life and death are fine the way they are, isn't he saved?"
When there are those for whom editing a Wiki is such a profoundly personal act, aren't we being a little too disrespectful when we start whining about the copyright minutiae that they overlooked when they were editing.
Ec
On 7/27/06, Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com wrote:
On 7/27/06, Oskar Sigvardsson oskarsigvardsson@gmail.com wrote:
I think you are all missing Antheres point. Who cares whether it's fair use or not? Do we really have to be so anal about the rules that we will infact bring this to IfD, instead of just quietly ignoring the copyright issue in this very special unique case. We are people, for christs sake, not automatons! Sometimes, process is not that important.
Fair use is an extremely important exemption to copyright law. There are good reasons to prohibit it e.g. in the User: space, and to require users to upload their own works as free content. But there is no single good reason why a photo that is important to Wikipedia's history, and that cannot easily be obtained as free content, wouldn't qualify as fair use in the Wikipedia: namespace.
You make these comments as though they are obvious, but I for one don't understand what you're referring to.
What are the good reasons to "prohibit fair use" in the User namespace that don't apply to the Wikipedia namespace? If the photo of Bernard was on my User namespace, would that be inappropriate?
Personally I don't see the problem with allowing ND licenses throughout the user namespace and the Wikipedia namespace, and even in the article namespace in situations where a more free license is not available. Anything under an ND license is pretty much automatically fair use.
Anthony
On 7/27/06, Anthony wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
What are the good reasons to "prohibit fair use" in the User namespace that don't apply to the Wikipedia namespace?
The user namespace is treated by most of its inhabitants as a space of personal ownership, and its content is almost unregulated. For instance, something like [[User:SPUI]] can survive only because it is a user page, and indeed, attempts to get rid of it would be dealt with as vandalism. Allowing fair use in that space is likely to lead to more MySpace pages, with random celebrity photos, O RLY type crap, and boobie-shaking GIF animations. Allowing only free content in the User: space is a way to limit it, whereas the content of the Wikipedia: space is already regulated by the community.
To me, this is not only about the legal validity of the use, it is also about its impact, and whether it is desirable.
Erik
Erik Moeller wrote:
On 7/27/06, Anthony wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
What are the good reasons to "prohibit fair use" in the User namespace that don't apply to the Wikipedia namespace?
The user namespace is treated by most of its inhabitants as a space of personal ownership, and its content is almost unregulated. For instance, something like [[User:SPUI]] can survive only because it is a user page, and indeed, attempts to get rid of it would be dealt with as vandalism. Allowing fair use in that space is likely to lead to more MySpace pages, with random celebrity photos, O RLY type crap, and boobie-shaking GIF animations. Allowing only free content in the User: space is a way to limit it, whereas the content of the Wikipedia: space is already regulated by the community.
To me, this is not only about the legal validity of the use, it is also about its impact, and whether it is desirable.
Erik
I agree that allowing fair use in user space would be risky. Allowing ND or NC seems much less risky. And is a provision many people would feel like imposing on self-pictures.
Ant
On 7/28/06, Anthere Anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
I agree that allowing fair use in user space would be risky. Allowing ND or NC seems much less risky. And is a provision many people would feel like imposing on self-pictures.
Defamation and libel are illegal in their own right, and the really abusive trolls are not going to care about what some licensing button says. Commercial use? Who on Earth would want to make commercial use of my ugly mug? And if you really worry about that, use a copyleft license -- and force others to license their work freely if they include yours.
Creative Commons, with its broad license catalog, encourages the intrusion of law into what should really be social contracts. There's no need to regulate every single human interaction with copyright. It's tempting, but unnecessary. Tell people what your wishes are. Avoid people who violate your social norms. Imagine a world without copyright -- it wouldn't function all that badly. Some say it would function better.
Erik
On 7/27/06, Anthere Anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
I agree that allowing fair use in user space would be risky. Allowing ND or NC seems much less risky. And is a provision many people would feel like imposing on self-pictures.
NC and ND don't actually do what half the people who say they want them think they do. What is 'commercial use'? What is a derivative work? How does the page that includes the image not manage to be a derivative work, etc.
The simple fact that so many users would love to use such licenses for their own work without considering the consequences is why we can not permit them.
On 7/27/06, Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com wrote:
On 7/27/06, Anthony wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
What are the good reasons to "prohibit fair use" in the User namespace that don't apply to the Wikipedia namespace?
The user namespace is treated by most of its inhabitants as a space of personal ownership, and its content is almost unregulated. For instance, something like [[User:SPUI]] can survive only because it is a user page, and indeed, attempts to get rid of it would be dealt with as vandalism. Allowing fair use in that space is likely to lead to more MySpace pages, with random celebrity photos, O RLY type crap, and boobie-shaking GIF animations. Allowing only free content in the User: space is a way to limit it, whereas the content of the Wikipedia: space is already regulated by the community.
To me, this is not only about the legal validity of the use, it is also about its impact, and whether it is desirable.
Erik
That's a reason, I suppose, but I don't consider it to be a good one. The problem in my opinion is that it attempts to solve one problem (crap in the user namespace), with a rather unrelated second one (ban non-free images).
Anyway, looking at the User:SPUI page I guess I see what you're saying. And I guess the ban on non-free content would tend to lessen this type of thing. Actually my response would probably be a minority one - I don't really see a problem with providing every Wikipedian with his or her own little private webspace, wholly unregulated by the community except for the limits of the law and space considerations.
IOW, good response, I guess you've convinced me that allowing fair use in the user namespace isn't something that's likely to happen. For those of us who want to be individuals who happen to contribute to Wikipedia as opposed to Wikipedians who happen to have interests outside of Wikipedia, we can just keep our user pages fairly sparse. Personally, I don't even bother to log in very much any more.
Anthony
Anthony wrote:
Anyway, looking at the User:SPUI page I guess I see what you're saying. And I guess the ban on non-free content would tend to lessen this type of thing. Actually my response would probably be a minority one - I don't really see a problem with providing every Wikipedian with his or her own little private webspace, wholly unregulated by the community except for the limits of the law and space considerations.
In my opinion, the only significant problem with your suggestion is that we currently have no formal way to distinguish a "Wikipedian" from "anyone who just registered an account". We may know one when we see one, but there's a broad grey area and no agreed-upon threshold for considering someone a genuine contributor to the encyclopedia.
In other words, we'd be providing a free-as-in-beer, anonymous, mostly unregulated webspace for anyone with an internet connection.
To some extent, of course, we're already doing that, but we've set up all sorts of minor speed bumps to make this feature less attractive to those who want to use it for purposes unrelated to the project. In fact, the whole userbox controversy effectively hinged on this: how easy or hard should we make it to put a 240-by-45-pixel box on one's user page, given that there clearly were and are people who are interested in doing that but not interested in contributing to the project?
At the time I considered proposing that we do away with user pages entirely, but this turns out to be infeasible since we do want to allow user subpages, for article drafts and whatnot, and we are just as lacking in a formal way to tell a useful user subpage from a vanity one.
Instead, perhaps what we should do is establish a rule that all pages in the User: namespace must be somehow related to the project and not contrary to its goals, and must, if necessary, explain how they are so; if not, they may and should be speedily deleted.
This doesn't mean you couldn't describe yourself on your user page. But if the page didn't include _any_ information actually relevant to the project, such as your contributions to Wikipedia, areas of interest, useful skills, etc., it would be unsuitable and speediable.
On Jul 29, 2006, at 5:16 AM, Ilmari Karonen wrote:
Instead, perhaps what we should do is establish a rule that all pages in the User: namespace must be somehow related to the project and not contrary to its goals, and must, if necessary, explain how they are so; if not, they may and should be speedily deleted.
This doesn't mean you couldn't describe yourself on your user page. But if the page didn't include _any_ information actually relevant to the project, such as your contributions to Wikipedia, areas of interest, useful skills, etc., it would be unsuitable and speediable.
To me this is just one more bunch of rules to enforce. We have so far to go in presenting usable verifiable information from reputable source that getting after inappropriate user pages seems out of priority.
Fred
Fred Bauder wrote:
On Jul 29, 2006, at 5:16 AM, Ilmari Karonen wrote:
Instead, perhaps what we should do is establish a rule that all pages in the User: namespace must be somehow related to the project and not contrary to its goals, and must, if necessary, explain how they are so; if not, they may and should be speedily deleted.
To me this is just one more bunch of rules to enforce. We have so far to go in presenting usable verifiable information from reputable source that getting after inappropriate user pages seems out of priority.
You do have a point. On the other hand, people (including Jimbo) obviously _do_ care about inappropriate user pages, as evidenced by the Great Userbox Wars of '06. Since this seems unlikely to change, a rule that made dealing with such pages simpler and more effective could in fact free up more time for actually building the encyclopedia.
On 7/29/06, Ilmari Karonen nospam@vyznev.net wrote:
Fred Bauder wrote:
On Jul 29, 2006, at 5:16 AM, Ilmari Karonen wrote:
Instead, perhaps what we should do is establish a rule that all pages in the User: namespace must be somehow related to the project and not contrary to its goals, and must, if necessary, explain how they are so; if not, they may and should be speedily deleted.
To me this is just one more bunch of rules to enforce. We have so far to go in presenting usable verifiable information from reputable source that getting after inappropriate user pages seems out of priority.
You do have a point. On the other hand, people (including Jimbo) obviously _do_ care about inappropriate user pages, as evidenced by the Great Userbox Wars of '06. Since this seems unlikely to change, a rule that made dealing with such pages simpler and more effective could in fact free up more time for actually building the encyclopedia.
-- Ilmari Karonen _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
I'm annoyed to the userbox controversy being consistently called "Great Userbox War". IT was not a war. Wikipedia is not a battlefield.
Such terms only invite trolling and makign people interested in arguing for the sake of arguing to join the project
Pedro Sanchez wrote:
I'm annoyed to the userbox controversy being consistently called "Great Userbox War". IT was not a war. Wikipedia is not a battlefield.
It's called sarcasm. I know it's hard to convey over the Internet, but I did honestly expect the Gratuitous Capitalization, not to mention the juxtaposition of the words "userbox" and "war", would in this case have made it clear enough. If you have any suggestions for making it even more over-the-top, please do tell.
In the fact of it, you are, of course, right. It's not a war, and calling it such is particularly ironic given that we do have actual real-world armed conflicts (the Israel/Lebanon one comes to mind, as well as the situation in Kosovo) spilling over to Wikipedia. It's a rather chilling thought that some of the people involved in those edit wars might actually be fighting the same battles off-wiki with real guns and bombs.
Ilmari Karonen wrote:
Pedro Sanchez wrote:
I'm annoyed to the userbox controversy being consistently called "Great Userbox War". IT was not a war. Wikipedia is not a battlefield.
It's called sarcasm. I know it's hard to convey over the Internet, but I did honestly expect the Gratuitous Capitalization, not to mention the juxtaposition of the words "userbox" and "war", would in this case have made it clear enough. If you have any suggestions for making it even more over-the-top, please do tell.
In the fact of it, you are, of course, right. It's not a war, and calling it such is particularly ironic given that we do have actual real-world armed conflicts (the Israel/Lebanon one comes to mind, as well as the situation in Kosovo) spilling over to Wikipedia. It's a rather chilling thought that some of the people involved in those edit wars might actually be fighting the same battles off-wiki with real guns and bombs.
I can imagine the headlines:
"OSAMA BIN LADEN CAPTURED WHILE EDITING WIKIPEDIA FROM INTERNET CAFE"
On 7/30/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) alphasigmax@gmail.com wrote:
Ilmari Karonen wrote:
It's called sarcasm. I know it's hard to convey over the Internet, but I did honestly expect the Gratuitous Capitalization, not to mention the juxtaposition of the words "userbox" and "war", would in this case have made it clear enough. If you have any suggestions for making it even more over-the-top, please do tell.
In the fact of it, you are, of course, right. It's not a war, and calling it such is particularly ironic given that we do have actual real-world armed conflicts (the Israel/Lebanon one comes to mind, as well as the situation in Kosovo) spilling over to Wikipedia. It's a rather chilling thought that some of the people involved in those edit wars might actually be fighting the same battles off-wiki with real guns and bombs.
I can imagine the headlines:
"OSAMA BIN LADEN CAPTURED WHILE EDITING WIKIPEDIA FROM INTERNET CAFE"
There's no such thing as bad publicity, right?
On 7/31/06, Death Phoenix originaldeathphoenix@gmail.com wrote:
There's no such thing as bad publicity, right?
Heh, I was just imagining a subheading:
"OSAMA BIN LADEN CAPTURED WHILE EDITING WIKIPEDIA FROM INTERNET CAFE"
Wales: We're serious about not allowing unsourced contributions - no exceptions!
Steve
On 7/29/06, Ilmari Karonen nospam@vyznev.net wrote:
It's a rather chilling thought that some of the people involved in those edit wars might actually be fighting the same battles off-wiki with real guns and bombs.
Not really our juristiction. Try to encourage them to get pics. We must have some wikipedians in Haifa. Do we have any chance of getting them to upload pics of craters?
On Jul 29, 2006, at 6:00 AM, Ilmari Karonen wrote:
You do have a point. On the other hand, people (including Jimbo) obviously _do_ care about inappropriate user pages, as evidenced by the Great Userbox Wars of '06. Since this seems unlikely to change, a rule that made dealing with such pages simpler and more effective could in fact free up more time for actually building the encyclopedia.
I suppose. I recused myself from the Arbitration case about the Userbox wheelwarrs, put a userbox on my page saying I support userboxes and keep on working on something sensible.
Fred
On 7/29/06, Ilmari Karonen nospam@vyznev.net wrote:
Anthony wrote:
Anyway, looking at the User:SPUI page I guess I see what you're saying. And I guess the ban on non-free content would tend to lessen this type of thing. Actually my response would probably be a minority one - I don't really see a problem with providing every Wikipedian with his or her own little private webspace, wholly unregulated by the community except for the limits of the law and space considerations.
In my opinion, the only significant problem with your suggestion is that we currently have no formal way to distinguish a "Wikipedian" from "anyone who just registered an account". We may know one when we see one, but there's a broad grey area and no agreed-upon threshold for considering someone a genuine contributor to the encyclopedia.
Well, I wasn't really making a suggestion so much as trying to explain how I feel about things.
But if it were a suggestion, one solution would be to provide everyone who contributes with some percentage of unregulated webspace equal to a percentage of their contributions. Contribute 100K of text and 10 megs of images? You get 10K of text and 1 meg of images in free webhosting.
Is this reasonable? I dunno. At the point where you're doing that you might as well just contract it out and let some third party run the webhosting site. But still keep things integrated. What I liked about my User page that I can't get at other hosting sites is the ability to easily create links to Wikipedia. And while you're at it you could integrate it into other sites too.
I'm going to repeat this so people don't confuse me. This isn't a proposal. It isn't a suggestion. It's just half-baked stream-of-consciousness musing on how I feel about things.
At the time I considered proposing that we do away with user pages entirely, but this turns out to be infeasible since we do want to allow user subpages, for article drafts and whatnot, and we are just as lacking in a formal way to tell a useful user subpage from a vanity one.
Article drafts, lists of links, to-do notes, public watchlists, etc. User subpages can be very useful because they are integrated into the rest of the site (red and blue links, related changes, what links here). They'd be more useful if you didn't have to worry about people coming along and changing them or deleting them out from under you, though.
Anthony
On 7/27/06, Oskar Sigvardsson oskarsigvardsson@gmail.com wrote:
I think you are all missing Antheres point. Who cares whether it's fair use or not? Do we really have to be so anal about the rules that we will infact bring this to IfD, instead of just quietly ignoring the copyright issue in this very special unique case. We are people, for christs sake, not automatons! Sometimes, process is not that important.
You are really asking, is it ok for Wikipedia to breach people's copyright when the chance of them suing is very slight? I would say yes. Most would say no.
Steve
Steve Bennett wrote:
On 7/27/06, Oskar Sigvardsson oskarsigvardsson@gmail.com wrote:
I think you are all missing Antheres point. Who cares whether it's fair use or not? Do we really have to be so anal about the rules that we will infact bring this to IfD, instead of just quietly ignoring the copyright issue in this very special unique case. We are people, for christs sake, not automatons! Sometimes, process is not that important.
You are really asking, is it ok for Wikipedia to breach people's copyright when the chance of them suing is very slight? I would say yes. Most would say no.
Although I consider the chance of a suit to be an important factor, it should never be the only factor. It should be accompanied by a rationale based on at least one of fair use, public domain, uncopyrightability, etc.
Ec
On 7/30/06, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Steve Bennett wrote:
On 7/27/06, Oskar Sigvardsson oskarsigvardsson@gmail.com wrote:
I think you are all missing Antheres point. Who cares whether it's fair use or not? Do we really have to be so anal about the rules that we will infact bring this to IfD, instead of just quietly ignoring the copyright issue in this very special unique case. We are people, for christs sake, not automatons! Sometimes, process is not that important.
You are really asking, is it ok for Wikipedia to breach people's copyright when the chance of them suing is very slight? I would say yes. Most would say no.
Although I consider the chance of a suit to be an important factor, it should never be the only factor. It should be accompanied by a rationale based on at least one of fair use, public domain, uncopyrightability, etc.
A good argument for fair use could probably be made in the vast majority of the situations when the chance of a lawsuit is very slight (in article space, anyway, as the use is already non-profit educational, and if no one is likely to sue the impact on the potential market for the work is probably small).
Anyway, I think another factor when utilizing this exception is that the person can't be easily contacted to ask them for permission. I'm thinking something like a video shot and released by Osama bin Ladin. 1) It's probably not released under a free license; 2) There's about 0 chance of Osama suing anyone over copyright infringement; and 3) It'd be really hard to contact bin Ladin to ask him to license his video under CC-BY or whatever.
Of course, any video shot and released by Osama bin Ladin probably also falls under fair use.
Anthony
Anthony wrote:
On 7/30/06, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Steve Bennett wrote:
On 7/27/06, Oskar Sigvardsson oskarsigvardsson@gmail.com wrote:
I think you are all missing Antheres point. Who cares whether it's fair use or not? Do we really have to be so anal about the rules that we will infact bring this to IfD, instead of just quietly ignoring the copyright issue in this very special unique case. We are people, for christs sake, not automatons! Sometimes, process is not that important.
You are really asking, is it ok for Wikipedia to breach people's copyright when the chance of them suing is very slight? I would say yes. Most would say no.
Although I consider the chance of a suit to be an important factor, it should never be the only factor. It should be accompanied by a rationale based on at least one of fair use, public domain, uncopyrightability, etc.
A good argument for fair use could probably be made in the vast majority of the situations when the chance of a lawsuit is very slight (in article space, anyway, as the use is already non-profit educational, and if no one is likely to sue the impact on the potential market for the work is probably small).
Anyway, I think another factor when utilizing this exception is that the person can't be easily contacted to ask them for permission. I'm thinking something like a video shot and released by Osama bin Ladin.
- It's probably not released under a free license; 2) There's about 0
chance of Osama suing anyone over copyright infringement; and 3) It'd be really hard to contact bin Ladin to ask him to license his video under CC-BY or whatever.
Of course, any video shot and released by Osama bin Ladin probably also falls under fair use.
Assuming that he's still living in Afghanistan, I believe that that country has never had copyright relations with the United States. That alone would make it public domain under US law. :-)
Ec
On 8/1/06, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Assuming that he's still living in Afghanistan, I believe that that country has never had copyright relations with the United States. That alone would make it public domain under US law. :-)
Ec
Almost certainly in Pakistan though. While there were some journalists who visted him in the 90s I doubt htey would resease any of their photos under a free lisence.
On 8/1/06, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Assuming that he's still living in Afghanistan, I believe that that country has never had copyright relations with the United States. That alone would make it public domain under US law. :-)
In other cases (e.g. Iran) we have not considered this legitimately public domain for our purposes. For one thing, if relations with the state were normalised, the copyright status would instantly change; secondly, I feel we should respect the intentions of copyright and not use such a legal loophole. We wouldn't be happy with Iranians and Afghans not respecting our copyright or license, would we?
-Matt
On 7/26/06, Anthere Anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
I uploaded the picture of Treanna on the english wikipedia. It was the picture he had on his user page. A bad image, but the only one we had for him. Certainly an image which will never be reused by anyone. But an image of Treanna.
I've tagged the photo as fair use and delisted it from IfD.
Erik
Erik Moeller wrote:
On 7/26/06, Anthere Anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
I uploaded the picture of Treanna on the english wikipedia. It was the picture he had on his user page. A bad image, but the only one we had for him. Certainly an image which will never be reused by anyone. But an image of Treanna.
I've tagged the photo as fair use and delisted it from IfD.
Erik
Thank you Erik and thank you Oskar.
Ant
On Wed, 26 Jul 2006 19:18:54 +0200, Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com wrote:
On 7/26/06, Anthere Anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
I uploaded the picture of Treanna on the english wikipedia. It was the picture he had on his user page. A bad image, but the only one we had for him. Certainly an image which will never be reused by anyone. But an image of Treanna.
I've tagged the photo as fair use and delisted it from IfD.
You could at least *try* to explain why the image should be allowed to stay as such even though it's blatantly against policy. Such as trying to invode the "comunity consensus" exception clause in item #9 of the fair use policy.
With the current explanation probided that image will most likely get shot on sight the next time a "copyright patroller" who are not aware of this debate notice the image.
I still say it would be better to just ask his family to re-release the image with a more free license.
On Wed, 26 Jul 2006 18:20:53 +0200, Anthere Anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Anthere#Image:Norbert3.jpg_listed_for...
Norbert was a much appreciated wikipedian on the french wikipedia. He contributed a lot. Wikipedia is not produced by machines. But by living beings. We should value people and we should value good contributors.
Norbert died some time ago. It was the first wikipedian we lost on the french project. At that point, he was the editor with the largest number of edits. And it was not only typos. He left us a last word just before he had an operation and did not survive it.
We sent flowers to his burial. We told his family how important he was for us and they were proud of what he did for Wikipedia. A text was written about him. And for some reasons, it was translated on the english signpost http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2005-10-10/News_an....
I uploaded the picture of Treanna on the english wikipedia. It was the picture he had on his user page. A bad image, but the only one we had for him. Certainly an image which will never be reused by anyone. But an image of Treanna.
The crime : it was uploaded as a non-derivative license. So, it is proposed for deletion.
And frankly, I can not ask Treanna any more if he would be nice enough to change that license to make it free by wikipedia definition.
Sorry if I'm beeing an insensitive prick here, but why not simply ask his family to change the license? With the author dead the family is the new legal copyright holder (unless he left a will stating otherwise), and we obviosly know how to get in contact with them. I mean by all means give them some time to grieve before confronting them with the GFDL release forms or whatever, but if we are planning to keep the image around permanently it seems like the only real solution. It is what we would have demanded of anyone else (people have literaly been banned for insisting on using NC or ND images of themselves on theyr own userpage), and I for one do not apreciate having double standards. Either we allow every unfree image with a sufficiently compelling "sob storry" to stay, or we stay true to our stated goals of free content even if it means that an image of someone dear to us can not be used. Personaly I favour the later.
On 7/29/06, Sherool jamydlan@online.no wrote:
On Wed, 26 Jul 2006 18:20:53 +0200, Anthere Anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
The crime : it was uploaded as a non-derivative license. So, it is proposed for deletion.
And frankly, I can not ask Treanna any more if he would be nice enough to change that license to make it free by wikipedia definition.
Sorry if I'm beeing an insensitive prick here, but why not simply ask his family to change the license? With the author dead the family is the new legal copyright holder (unless he left a will stating otherwise), and we obviosly know how to get in contact with them. I mean by all means give them some time to grieve before confronting them with the GFDL release forms or whatever, but if we are planning to keep the image around permanently it seems like the only real solution. It is what we would have demanded of anyone else (people have literaly been banned for insisting on using NC or ND images of themselves on theyr own userpage), and I for one do not apreciate having double standards. Either we allow every unfree image with a sufficiently compelling "sob storry" to stay, or we stay true to our stated goals of free content even if it means that an image of someone dear to us can not be used. Personaly I favour the later.
I agree with the sentiment, but I think it ignores an important sanity check. Why does the image have to be free in the first place?
It's obviously not a legal reason, as the ND license means things are perfectly legal. So why is just being legal not enough? The reason is so that third parties can use the content.
Well, the image is ND, so third parties *can* use the content, "in all media and formats whether now known or hereafter devised". Further, they can "make such modifications as are technically necessary to exercise the rights in other media and formats". And they can also make any modifications which are permitted under the doctrine of fair use. A third party could copy [[Wikipedia:Deceased Wikipedians]]. They could add other people to it. They could remove some. They could change the text. They could probably enhance the image itself under the doctrine of fair use. They could print out this new copy. They could create an article on Bernard and include the image in it. They could make a newspaper article out of that article. They could broadcast a television show which included the picture in it.
I for one can't think of anything that a third party is going to want to do with this image that they can't legally do, unless it's some troll picking on this image just to make a point.
For me, it has nothing to do with a double standard. The only way I think it could even be argued that it makes sense to ban this image would be if the parents were contacted and they flat out refused to license the image under a free license. Then I suppose you could argue that we should refuse to include the image, basically as an ultimatum. Even then though I tend to be of the opinion that CC-BY-ND is "free enough", especially for an image in the Wikipedia namespace of a person who is almost surely never going to have an article about him.
Anthony
On Sat, 29 Jul 2006 16:14:15 +0200, Anthony wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
On 7/29/06, Sherool jamydlan@online.no wrote:
On Wed, 26 Jul 2006 18:20:53 +0200, Anthere Anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
The crime : it was uploaded as a non-derivative license. So, it is proposed for deletion.
And frankly, I can not ask Treanna any more if he would be nice enough to change that license to make it free by wikipedia definition.
Sorry if I'm beeing an insensitive prick here, but why not simply ask his family to change the license? With the author dead the family is the new legal copyright holder (unless he left a will stating otherwise), and we obviosly know how to get in contact with them. I mean by all means give them some time to grieve before confronting them with the GFDL release forms or whatever, but if we are planning to keep the image around permanently it seems like the only real solution. It is what we would have demanded of anyone else (people have literaly been banned for insisting on using NC or ND images of themselves on theyr own userpage), and I for one do not apreciate having double standards. Either we allow every unfree image with a sufficiently compelling "sob storry" to stay, or we stay true to our stated goals of free content even if it means that an image of someone dear to us can not be used. Personaly I favour the later.
I agree with the sentiment, but I think it ignores an important sanity check. Why does the image have to be free in the first place?
It's obviously not a legal reason, as the ND license means things are perfectly legal. So why is just being legal not enough? The reason is so that third parties can use the content.
Well, the image is ND, so third parties *can* use the content, "in all media and formats whether now known or hereafter devised". Further, they can "make such modifications as are technically necessary to exercise the rights in other media and formats". And they can also make any modifications which are permitted under the doctrine of fair use. A third party could copy [[Wikipedia:Deceased Wikipedians]]. They could add other people to it. They could remove some. They could change the text. They could probably enhance the image itself under the doctrine of fair use. They could print out this new copy. They could create an article on Bernard and include the image in it. They could make a newspaper article out of that article. They could broadcast a television show which included the picture in it.
I for one can't think of anything that a third party is going to want to do with this image that they can't legally do, unless it's some troll picking on this image just to make a point.
For me, it has nothing to do with a double standard. The only way I think it could even be argued that it makes sense to ban this image would be if the parents were contacted and they flat out refused to license the image under a free license. Then I suppose you could argue that we should refuse to include the image, basically as an ultimatum. Even then though I tend to be of the opinion that CC-BY-ND is "free enough", especially for an image in the Wikipedia namespace of a person who is almost surely never going to have an article about him.
Our current policy is that we want our content to be (completely) free (wich include the ability to make derivative works) *especialy* in comunity space (since all user contributions are supposed to be free licensed). Granted this is more for "philosophical" reasons (we are a free content project and all that) than practical legal ones, but it *is* the current policy, in fact is is one of the 5 pillars of the project wich states "(...)Do not submit copyright infringements **or works licensed in a way incompatible with the GFDL**." (emphasis mine), and just for the record ND licenses are not compatable with the GFDL.
If you are saying we should change the policy and allow use of unfree (or at least "semi free") contnet in "community space" because it is seperate from our content, then that is one thing, I disagree, but it is a somewhat valid argument. You might be interested in trying to breathe som life back info http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Licensing_for_community_images. However what I'm trying to say is that I'm uncomfortable with the idea of a handfull of users just desciding that in this one case we will simply ignore a core policy of the project because it doesn't allow them to do what they want to.
On 7/29/06, Sherool jamydlan@online.no wrote:
Our current policy is that we want our content to be (completely) free (wich include the ability to make derivative works) *especialy* in comunity space (since all user contributions are supposed to be free licensed). Granted this is more for "philosophical" reasons (we are a free content project and all that) than practical legal ones, but it *is* the current policy, in fact is is one of the 5 pillars of the project wich states "(...)Do not submit copyright infringements **or works licensed in a way incompatible with the GFDL**." (emphasis mine), and just for the record ND licenses are not compatable with the GFDL.
If you are saying we should change the policy and allow use of unfree (or at least "semi free") contnet in "community space" because it is seperate from our content, then that is one thing, I disagree, but it is a somewhat valid argument.
Well, yeah, that is what I'm saying. But I should point out that this *was* the policy up until about a year ago. The new policy in my opinion doesn't make any sense. This particular example is evidence of that.
Yes, we'd like everything to be free (how "completely" varies from person to person, but putting a restriction on most derivative works is certainly not acceptable). You say especially in project space. I say especially in article space. But either way, a wish for everything to be complete free does not equal a mandate that everything must be completely free.
As for whether or not ND licenses are "compatible" with the GFDL, it seems to me that they're just as compatible as CC-BY-SA licenses. You're not suggesting that these must be removed from Wikipedia, are you?
I'd also like to point out something you said. Maybe you meant it in this way, and maybe you didn't. You said "all user contributions are supposed to be free licensed". I take that to mean that contributions for which the Wikipedian owns the copyright must be free licensed. If that were the situation, if we were talking about a case where a Wikipedian owned the license to the image, then I think we'd be talking about something different.
You might be interested in trying to breathe som life back info http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Licensing_for_community_images.
No, not at all. Wikipedia politics is not a game I'm good at playing.
However what I'm trying to say is that I'm uncomfortable with the idea of a handfull of users just desciding that in this one case we will simply ignore a core policy of the project because it doesn't allow them to do what they want to.
And I completely agree with this part of your argument. There shouldn't be a special exception made just for this case. If the vast majority of people agree that Wikipedia should include this image in the Wikipedia namespace, then we should be asking ourselves why, and adapting the policy to fit this situation.
And while we're at it, we should either remove [[Image:Wikimedia.png]] from the User namespace or examine why policy allows that one too. Allowing that one in the User namespace is just plain old hypocrisy.
Anthony
On 29/07/06, Anthony wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
And while we're at it, we should either remove [[Image:Wikimedia.png]] from the User namespace or examine why policy allows that one too. Allowing that one in the User namespace is just plain old hypocrisy.
I entirely agree. I'm guessing a logo is fully copyrighted so that others can't use it to masquerade as us? I can't really think of a compromise though between copyrighting logos and allowing users to display them.
Oldak Quill wrote:
On 29/07/06, Anthony wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
And while we're at it, we should either remove [[Image:Wikimedia.png]] from the User namespace or examine why policy allows that one too. Allowing that one in the User namespace is just plain old hypocrisy.
I entirely agree. I'm guessing a logo is fully copyrighted so that others can't use it to masquerade as us? I can't really think of a compromise though between copyrighting logos and allowing users to display them.
You're mixing up copyright with trademarks. It's trademark law that prevents others from masquerading as us.
Ec
On 7/29/06, Oldak Quill oldakquill@gmail.com wrote:
On 29/07/06, Anthony wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
And while we're at it, we should either remove [[Image:Wikimedia.png]] from the User namespace or examine why policy allows that one too. Allowing that one in the User namespace is just plain old hypocrisy.
I entirely agree. I'm guessing a logo is fully copyrighted so that others can't use it to masquerade as us? I can't really think of a compromise though between copyrighting logos and allowing users to display them.
I believe the logos aren't freely licensed because releasing it under a free copyright license could be seen as a waiver of the trademark rights. Of course the fact that the copyright of most of the logos were originally held by someone other than Wikimedia would seem to negate that argument in those situations. If "The Cuncator" (sorry, I don't know his name) and/or David Friedland released their logo designs into the public domain, that couldn't possibly impact Wikimedia's trademark rights.
Anyway, while I'd love to see the logo released under a free license, I'd be more willing to accept that it isn't if it was treated under the same rules.
Anthony
On 7/29/06, Anthony wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
Well, yeah, that is what I'm saying. But I should point out that this *was* the policy up until about a year ago. The new policy in my opinion doesn't make any sense. This particular example is evidence of that.
I don't think I agree with you - at least in terms of the project's official policy. /De facto/, restricted images were sometimes tolerated or ignored, but I don't think ever officially approved of.
-Matt
On Sat, 29 Jul 2006 22:44:49 +0200, Anthony wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
<snip>
As for whether or not ND licenses are "compatible" with the GFDL, it seems to me that they're just as compatible as CC-BY-SA licenses. You're not suggesting that these must be removed from Wikipedia, are you?
There is in fact a big difference between the two. The GFDL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_the_GNU_Free_Documentation_License states :
"You may copy and distribute a Modified Version of the Document under the conditions of sections 2 and 3 above, provided that you release the Modified Version under precisely this License, with the Modified Version filling the role of the Document, thus licensing distribution and modification of the Modified Version to whoever possesses a copy of it(...)".
So if you use a "no modifications" license you have less freedoms than what you are granted by the GFDL, so the license is not GFDL compatable.
The CC-BY-SA and simmilar licenses are however compatable because the requirements are equal to, or less restrictive than those imposed by the GFDL. The GFDL is a share alike license, so it is not a problem that CC-*-SA requre derivative works to use the same license, GFDL does the same. GFDL also require at least 5 (or all if less than 5) previous editors to be credited, CC-BY-* type licenses "only" require than credit is given to the author as spesified by him/her.
So no reason to get rid of all the CC-BY-SA stuff.
<snip>
And while we're at it, we should either remove [[Image:Wikimedia.png]] from the User namespace or examine why policy allows that one too. Allowing that one in the User namespace is just plain old hypocrisy.
That is a very good point. I have never realy seen a straight explanation for why those logos are permited (or when they are not permited). I believe the foundation have allowed them to be used in various "meta" templates and such, but I'm not sure if the implications to our overall copyright policy have ever been examined, or if we just keep them around by force of old habbit...
Anthony wrote:
You might be interested in trying to breathe som life back info http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Licensing_for_community_images.
No, not at all. Wikipedia politics is not a game I'm good at playing.
Aren't you ashamed to be claiming that your time could be better spent doing something else? ;-)
However what I'm trying to say is that I'm uncomfortable with the idea of a handfull of users just desciding that in this one case we will simply ignore a core policy of the project because it doesn't allow them to do what they want to.
And I completely agree with this part of your argument. There shouldn't be a special exception made just for this case. If the vast majority of people agree that Wikipedia should include this image in the Wikipedia namespace, then we should be asking ourselves why, and adapting the policy to fit this situation.
Okay. At the same time we could say that it's only a handful of users who spend their time writing policies. A few others get involved becaus the proposed policy affects what they are doing at that time. Most of us would prefer to avoid the mind-fucking experience of policy writing.
Ec
Sherool wrote:
Our current policy is that we want our content to be (completely) free (wich include the ability to make derivative works) *especialy* in comunity space (since all user contributions are supposed to be free licensed). Granted this is more for "philosophical" reasons (we are a free content project and all that) than practical legal ones, but it *is* the current policy, in fact is is one of the 5 pillars of the project wich states "(...)Do not submit copyright infringements **or works licensed in a way incompatible with the GFDL**." (emphasis mine), and just for the record ND licenses are not compatable with the GFDL.
Personally, I prefer to be guided by that core policy as if it simply read, "Respect copyright." Core policies should be simple and straigtforward, and adhering to them on that basis makes more common sense than trying to keep up to date with the whims of the professional policy writers.
Ec
On 7/29/06, Sherool jamydlan@online.no wrote:
If you are saying we should change the policy and allow use of unfree (or at least "semi free") contnet in "community space" because it is seperate from our content, then that is one thing, I disagree, but it is a somewhat valid argument. You might be interested in trying to breathe som life back info
Although this would have lots of "bad uses", there are times when it would be useful, like uploading images related to WP:FPC. There are times you'd like to upload an image that demonstrates a technique, flaw, related image etc - but it's your own private photo and you don't want to release it under GFDL. For example, someone is nominating a photo of a dragonfly, and says it's great. You want to show them a much better photo of a dragonfly that you took (to show how easy it is), but you don't want to release it under free licence. Seem reasonable?
The current "best practice" is simply not to label it at all - it will probably survive deletion for 1-2 weeks.
Steve