Speaking, as we have been, of images and user pages, I just had to remove an image from quite a few user pages along with a couple articles. This is an image I venture that many people would recognize.
In this case the problem was not a bogus claim of fair use; it was a bogus claim that the image was in the public domain. So, I would like to take this opportunity to remind everyone of some very important points:
1. Many, if not most, photos on US government websites are *not* in the public domain. Like many companies, the government makes considerable use of stock photos. If the site doesn't clearly indicate that the image was created by a federal government employee, you should assume that it wasn't.
2. "Royalty-free" is a marketing term in the stock photo industry. It means that if you buy a license to use the picture, you won't have to pay royalties every single time you use it. Royalty-free most assuredly does *not* mean that a photo is freely licensed, in the sense that it could be used on Wikipedia.
3. The image description page for *every* picture should credit the photographer or artist if known. The immediate source is also helpful to know, but this source may well have the image second- or third-hand.
4. When you find an image on another website, if you can't figure out who took the picture or where it came from, it is almost certain that the website operator is not in a position to license its use on Wikipedia. It is actually quite possible that the use of the photo on the website is already a copyright infringement.
5. Even when using content that has passed into the public domain, the author or creator should be identified. This is vital in order to be able to demonstrate that the content is, in fact, in the public domain. Knowing when the content was first published is also extremely helpful.
Anything that is tagged as being in the public domain without satisfying these principles should be treated with great suspicion.
--Michael Snow
On 1/13/06, Michael Snow wikipedia@earthlink.net wrote:
- Many, if not most, photos on US government websites are *not* in the
public domain. Like many companies, the government makes considerable use of stock photos. If the site doesn't clearly indicate that the image was created by a federal government employee, you should assume that it wasn't.
One additional bit on this: many government agencies are run by contractors, and contractors can have entirely different (i.e. non-free) intellectual property rights than "employees of the federal government", *even* if the work is done under apparently government auspices and entirely with government money. For example, Sandia National Laboratories is a U.S. Department of Energy National Laboratory but it has and claims the rights to retain copyrights on its materials, as is spelled out in the contracts with the DOE and the company who manages the lab, Lockheed Martin. So even if the agency says it created the content, it may still not be free in many instances! (This comes up primarily with the many DOE labs, which are all run by contractors. I've tried to post the copyright statements that I could find of the individual labs to the talk page fo the PD-USGov-DOE template. Most are not free enough for Wikipedia.)
FF