I posted this a few days ago but failed to get any responses, so I'm trying again. Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote: The variations in copyright laws can be a tremendous hurdle. As a person active on Wikisource, I've developed quite a different perspective on the matter. There, the issue rarely has anything to do with images. To whatever extent we may want images the copyrights are usually an extension of the work that contains them. Nor, since we include whole books, is fair use a major topic. Whether or not a given work is in the public domain, is a far more common problem and far more difficult. It can be even more difficult if we need to look after the interests of the downstream user. In an earlier post in this thread Jimbo said "we are not legal risk takers" That does not get rid of the problem. When does the risk probability become so small that it is no longer a risk? Which carries the greater risk, an earthquake in California, or a hurricane in Florida? Compare that with the risk of a law suit over a particular technical copyright infringement. The range of risks is very wide, and nobody is seriously suggesting that we carry the text of any current best seller. These are among the questions we have encountered: 1. Hitler's "Mein Kampf" - Volume 1 was originally published in 1926. There were four distinct English translations (one British, three American) between 1932 and 1041. The British translator died in 1946. The American translation copyrights are all owned by Houghton-Mifflin and were properly renewed. We determined that we could not carry the existing English versions. The German language version could probably be safely carried in the US because of enemy property exemptions when the U. S. agreed to honour European copyright extensions. Other countries have had mixed messages about whether the copyrights continue to be valid. 2. Yogananda's "Autobiography of a Yogi" This was originally published in 1946. He died in 1952. The organization that held posthumous rights to the work renewed the copyright in 1974, but it was challenged in court in 2000. The copyright was overturned on the grounds that it could not be proved that Yogananda had granted them the right to renew. We now carry this work. 3. Max Planck won the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1918. This was awarded to him at a ceremony in 1920 where he delivered an acceptance speech. The Swedish Academy published this with other similar speeches in 1921. A separate version of the speech was also published in England in 1922. It has not yet been established whether a U.S. edition exists. Planck died in 1947. The work would appear to be in the public domain in the U. S. because it was published before 1923, but would continue to be protected in Sweden and Germany until 2017. Following this line of thought the lecture delivered by Pieter Zeeman when he won the 1902 physics prize would be the oldest one still covered by copyright. This issue is still undecided. In dealing with matters like this to what extent do we protect downstream users? Should we go ahead and include the text, and add a warning that a downstream user republishes the material at his own risk? There are probably other areas where we could safely republish material that is prima facie copyright, but that point can be discussed at some other time. Suffice it to say that any such action should not be done recklessly. Ec

John <flockmeal(a)gmail.com> wrote: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Image_copyright_tags has instructions. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Yann/Untagged_Images has a list of untagged images. You could ask the uploader about it, or you could decide that the image is {{fairuse}} following the guidelines at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_description_page#Fair_use_rationale. Or you could add {{unverified}} to the image description page. Angela.