There are two problems with letting just anybody upload images: 1) Copyright law is very complex. Most people don't understand it. 2) Most people *aren't aware* that they don't understand it.
By letting everyone upload images to Wikipedia, we're telling them that we trust them to understand what is and is not allowed. Then, we turn around and bite them by deleting their images when, inevitably, they make mistakes. It confuses people no end to be told that they both are and aren't able to upload images correctly.
I see this confusion every day, in the questions on my talkpage, or on OrphanBot's user and talkpages, or on the image-related pages in Wikipedia:-space. I haven't had OrphanBot go through the 35,000 talk pages that it's left messages on, but I expect that if I did, I'd find hundreds more questions, unanswered because nobody ever saw them.
I also see this in the form of users floundering around, trying out different templates to see which one will get the bot off their back, or using clearly-incorrect templates based on a misunderstanding of copyright, or making up template-like statements because they don't understand what a template is, or providing "fair use rationales" that amount to little more than a statement of "I once heard these words in a copyright context".
I don't have the time to deal with this confusion by explaining Wikipedia's policies to everyone, and most uploaders don't stick around long enough to learn. The best I can do is respond to the occasional user who finds their way to my talkpage.
Much of the image deletion policy is based around the fact that there are maybe a dozen people on Wikipedia who understand the image use policy well enough to enforce it, and are willing to take the time to do so. At the same time, over two thousand new images are uploaded each day, adding to the 553,000 images already on Wikipedia.
By making image uploading a privilege to be earned rather than a right conferred by registering an account, we can relax the policy and deal with uploaders individually, rather than automated notification of problems and nearly-automated deletion of problematic images.
On 7/21/06, Mark Wagner carnildo@gmail.com wrote:
There are two problems with letting just anybody upload images:
- Copyright law is very complex. Most people don't understand it.
- Most people *aren't aware* that they don't understand it.
By letting everyone upload images to Wikipedia, we're telling them that we trust them to understand what is and is not allowed. Then, we turn around and bite them by deleting their images when, inevitably, they make mistakes. It confuses people no end to be told that they both are and aren't able to upload images correctly.
Suggestion: Make the default level of privilege "you can upload into the waiting bin". Then privileged users can retrieve from the waiting bin and make them publicly accessible, or delete them, at their discretion. Periodically purge files that have been sitting there more than a month or two.
The privilege to make files publicly accessible should be granted liberally, but revoked when needed, perhaps on a "3 strikes" basis.
Steve
I like the waiting bin idea. We also need to go through and wipe all images older than 3 weeks that have never been used.
Too much crap.
On 7/21/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 7/21/06, Mark Wagner carnildo@gmail.com wrote:
There are two problems with letting just anybody upload images:
- Copyright law is very complex. Most people don't understand it.
- Most people *aren't aware* that they don't understand it.
By letting everyone upload images to Wikipedia, we're telling them that we trust them to understand what is and is not allowed. Then, we turn around and bite them by deleting their images when, inevitably, they make mistakes. It confuses people no end to be told that they both are and aren't able to upload images correctly.
Suggestion: Make the default level of privilege "you can upload into the waiting bin". Then privileged users can retrieve from the waiting bin and make them publicly accessible, or delete them, at their discretion. Periodically purge files that have been sitting there more than a month or two.
The privilege to make files publicly accessible should be granted liberally, but revoked when needed, perhaps on a "3 strikes" basis.
Steve _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
On 7/21/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
Suggestion: Make the default level of privilege "you can upload into the waiting bin". Then privileged users can retrieve from the waiting bin and make them publicly accessible, or delete them, at their discretion. Periodically purge files that have been sitting there more than a month or two.
The privilege to make files publicly accessible should be granted liberally, but revoked when needed, perhaps on a "3 strikes" basis.
Steve
One heck of a workload there. Probably a better option would be just as new users can't move pages they should not be able to upload images. Once they have stuck around a bit it is probably worth educating them about our image copyright rules.
On 7/21/06, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
One heck of a workload there. Probably a better option would be just as new users can't move pages they should not be able to upload images. Once they have stuck around a bit it is probably worth educating them about our image copyright rules.
There's no inherent workload in telling people to dump their rubbish across the road rather than in your living room. If we have to retrieve good uploads from the same user more than once or twice, we should give them image rights.
It also would give us the opportunity to assess whether people are uploading anything useful before giving them those rights. A useful rule of thumb might be "three good uploads and you get image rights, three bad ones and you lose them".
Steve
On 7/21/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 7/21/06, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
One heck of a workload there. Probably a better option would be just as new users can't move pages they should not be able to upload images. Once they have stuck around a bit it is probably worth educating them about our image copyright rules.
There's no inherent workload in telling people to dump their rubbish across the road rather than in your living room. If we have to retrieve good uploads from the same user more than once or twice, we should give them image rights.
It also would give us the opportunity to assess whether people are uploading anything useful before giving them those rights. A useful rule of thumb might be "three good uploads and you get image rights, three bad ones and you lose them".
Steve
The problem is that process would be harder to semi automate than the current one.
On 7/21/06, Mark Wagner carnildo@gmail.com wrote:
There are two problems with letting just anybody upload images:
- Copyright law is very complex. Most people don't understand it.
- Most people *aren't aware* that they don't understand it.
Isn't that a problem with letting just anybody add text, too?
On 7/21/06, Anthony wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
On 7/21/06, Mark Wagner carnildo@gmail.com wrote:
There are two problems with letting just anybody upload images:
- Copyright law is very complex. Most people don't understand it.
- Most people *aren't aware* that they don't understand it.
Isn't that a problem with letting just anybody add text, too?
It's easier to detect copyvioed text (just google it), and people protect their images more jealously than they do their text. Also, editors are much more likely to upload the "canonical' image of their subject than some "canonical" text about it.
Three reasons why it's a much bigger problem for images.
Steve
On 7/21/06, Anthony wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
On 7/21/06, Mark Wagner carnildo@gmail.com wrote:
There are two problems with letting just anybody upload images:
- Copyright law is very complex. Most people don't understand it.
- Most people *aren't aware* that they don't understand it.
Isn't that a problem with letting just anybody add text, too?
Not really. I think it's a product of the public school system, but people generally understand that taking somebody else's writing and passing it off as their own is wrong, even if they don't understand that it's a copyright violation. The same can't be said of images.
On 7/21/06, Mark Wagner carnildo@gmail.com wrote:
On 7/21/06, Anthony wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
On 7/21/06, Mark Wagner carnildo@gmail.com wrote:
There are two problems with letting just anybody upload images:
- Copyright law is very complex. Most people don't understand it.
- Most people *aren't aware* that they don't understand it.
Isn't that a problem with letting just anybody add text, too?
Not really. I think it's a product of the public school system, but people generally understand that taking somebody else's writing and passing it off as their own is wrong, even if they don't understand that it's a copyright violation. The same can't be said of images.
Wait a second, are we talking about copyright infringement, plagiarism, or legal use of non-free content? These are three separate problems. I thought the original post was talking about copyright infringement, but this new post talks about "taking somebody else's writing and passing it off as their own".
Anthony
On 7/21/06, Anthony wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
On 7/21/06, Mark Wagner carnildo@gmail.com wrote:
On 7/21/06, Anthony wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
On 7/21/06, Mark Wagner carnildo@gmail.com wrote:
There are two problems with letting just anybody upload images:
- Copyright law is very complex. Most people don't understand it.
- Most people *aren't aware* that they don't understand it.
Isn't that a problem with letting just anybody add text, too?
Not really. I think it's a product of the public school system, but people generally understand that taking somebody else's writing and passing it off as their own is wrong, even if they don't understand that it's a copyright violation. The same can't be said of images.
Wait a second, are we talking about copyright infringement, plagiarism, or legal use of non-free content? These are three separate problems. I thought the original post was talking about copyright infringement, but this new post talks about "taking somebody else's writing and passing it off as their own".
Most people don't distinguish between "plagiarism" and "copyright infringement" when it comes to writing: the school system is very effective at training people that simply copying the contents of the Encyclopedia Britannica isn't an acceptable way of writing a report, which is why we don't get very many instances of copyright violations with text.
Images are a different matter. The most common use of pictures in school is the collage, where students are encouraged to use pictures from many different sources.
Mark Wagner wrote:
On 7/21/06, Anthony wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
Wait a second, are we talking about copyright infringement, plagiarism, or legal use of non-free content? These are three separate problems. I thought the original post was talking about copyright infringement, but this new post talks about "taking somebody else's writing and passing it off as their own".
Most people don't distinguish between "plagiarism" and "copyright infringement" when it comes to writing: the school system is very effective at training people that simply copying the contents of the Encyclopedia Britannica isn't an acceptable way of writing a report, which is why we don't get very many instances of copyright violations with text.
Using the work of a PD author without credit would still be plagiarism, but not copyvio.
A straight translation of copyright text from any other language would still be infringement, but very hard to detect.
Ec
Ray Saintonge wrote:
Mark Wagner wrote:
On 7/21/06, Anthony wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
Wait a second, are we talking about copyright infringement, plagiarism, or legal use of non-free content? These are three separate problems. I thought the original post was talking about copyright infringement, but this new post talks about "taking somebody else's writing and passing it off as their own".
Most people don't distinguish between "plagiarism" and "copyright infringement" when it comes to writing: the school system is very effective at training people that simply copying the contents of the Encyclopedia Britannica isn't an acceptable way of writing a report, which is why we don't get very many instances of copyright violations with text.
Using the work of a PD author without credit would still be plagiarism, but not copyvio.
As I understand it, under French (and possibly also German) law a content creator has "moral rights" (ie. right to attribution) even after copyright expires, which are (somehow) part of the copyright law.
On 7/26/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) alphasigmax@gmail.com wrote:
As I understand it, under French (and possibly also German) law a content creator has "moral rights" (ie. right to attribution) even after copyright expires, which are (somehow) part of the copyright law.
"Moral rights" don't usually include the right to force others to attribute you, but they include the right to attribute yourself. For example, you write some open source code for company X. They own the copyright. You have moral rights. You can go to company Y and tell them "I wrote that awesome code". They ask for a copy. You say "sorry, that would violate X's copyright".
Steve
Alphax (Wikipedia email) wrote:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
Mark Wagner wrote:
On 7/21/06, Anthony wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
Wait a second, are we talking about copyright infringement, plagiarism, or legal use of non-free content? These are three separate problems. I thought the original post was talking about copyright infringement, but this new post talks about "taking somebody else's writing and passing it off as their own".
Most people don't distinguish between "plagiarism" and "copyright infringement" when it comes to writing: the school system is very effective at training people that simply copying the contents of the Encyclopedia Britannica isn't an acceptable way of writing a report, which is why we don't get very many instances of copyright violations with text.
Using the work of a PD author without credit would still be plagiarism, but not copyvio.
As I understand it, under French (and possibly also German) law a content creator has "moral rights" (ie. right to attribution) even after copyright expires, which are (somehow) part of the copyright law.
Yes, there's even a loosely worded section about this in the US copyright law. Neverthelesss, the actual term "copyright" is defined separately. The confusion is understandable, but complying with the moral rights should be a lot easier. It's good scholarship even for those works which have no protection at all.
Ec
Mark Wagner wrote:
By making image uploading a privilege to be earned rather than a right conferred by registering an account, we can relax the policy and deal with uploaders individually, rather than automated notification of problems and nearly-automated deletion of problematic images.
Amen. It seems like it would be easy to only grant uploading privs to accounts active for, say, a month, and with at least 100 edits. Sure it can be gamed, but the point is filter out the ignorant, not the malicious.
It would be more fun to have an automated quiz, where you have to answer some image-copyright-related questions correctly to gain the priv, but also more coding.
Stan
On 7/21/06, Stan Shebs shebs@apple.com wrote:
Mark Wagner wrote:
By making image uploading a privilege to be earned rather than a right conferred by registering an account, we can relax the policy and deal with uploaders individually, rather than automated notification of problems and nearly-automated deletion of problematic images.
Amen. It seems like it would be easy to only grant uploading privs to accounts active for, say, a month, and with at least 100 edits.
Can't be done. Mediawiki doesn't keep track of edit counts.
geni schrieb:
On 7/21/06, Stan Shebs shebs@apple.com wrote:
Mark Wagner wrote:
By making image uploading a privilege to be earned rather than a right conferred by registering an account, we can relax the policy and deal with uploaders individually, rather than automated notification of problems and nearly-automated deletion of problematic images.
Amen. It seems like it would be easy to only grant uploading privs to accounts active for, say, a month, and with at least 100 edits.
Can't be done. Mediawiki doesn't keep track of edit counts.
Ahem.
SELECT COUNT, anyone?
Yes, slow, but maybe OK for a button "Grant me upload privileges", which would be rarely pressed?
Magnus
Some problems I see with this:
If you are doing an article on any subject related to popular culture, you are in a serious bind, because any film, television or comic image is under copyright BY DEFINITION, even if the creators of the work you are illustrating the article about had nothing to do with that image's creation. For example, ANY picture of Superman would be in violation regardless of its age or source, because the image of Superman is itself someone else's intellectual property (in this case Time Warner).
This, and the dispute over fancruft in the other thread, is compounding the dillemma I am facing over whether I can accept the idea of contuing to be involved with Wikipedia. If uploading images is such a legally and ethically complicated thing, then is not the editing of Wikipedia itself even more so? The civil penalties for libel and slander are much more severe than those for copyright violation, after all.
My point is that I find myself questioning, almost as I did at the beginning of my involvement with the project, the reason for it and the point to it. The very concept of "An encyclopedia anyone can edit" is a complete contradiction in logic. The purpose of any encyclopedia is to provide a reliable baseline from which one can gain enough groundwork to do additional research about a topic without being led horrifically astray. This purpose is utterly defeated by the ability of anyone, anywhere in the world to alter and delete articles at will. while one can certainbly show off what one knows or thinks he knows by editing Wikipedia, the question is what does anyone actually gain from READING it?
I am wondering whether we are not all engaged in some gigantic folly that is destroying not only our own credibility but that of the Internet as a whole.
On Jul 21, 2006, at 7:39 AM, Michael Hopcroft wrote:
Some problems I see with this:
If you are doing an article on any subject related to popular culture, you are in a serious bind, because any film, television or comic image is under copyright BY DEFINITION, even if the creators of the work you are illustrating the article about had nothing to do with that image's creation. For example, ANY picture of Superman would be in violation regardless of its age or source, because the image of Superman is itself someone else's intellectual property (in this case Time Warner).
This, and the dispute over fancruft in the other thread, is compounding the dillemma I am facing over whether I can accept the idea of contuing to be involved with Wikipedia. If uploading images is such a legally and ethically complicated thing, then is not the editing of Wikipedia itself even more so? The civil penalties for libel and slander are much more severe than those for copyright violation, after all.
My point is that I find myself questioning, almost as I did at the beginning of my involvement with the project, the reason for it and the point to it. The very concept of "An encyclopedia anyone can edit" is a complete contradiction in logic. The purpose of any encyclopedia is to provide a reliable baseline from which one can gain enough groundwork to do additional research about a topic without being led horrifically astray. This purpose is utterly defeated by the ability of anyone, anywhere in the world to alter and delete articles at will. while one can certainbly show off what one knows or thinks he knows by editing Wikipedia, the question is what does anyone actually gain from READING it?
I am wondering whether we are not all engaged in some gigantic folly that is destroying not only our own credibility but that of the Internet as a whole.
I think the way to look at it is from the improvement that your own editing makes to the project. Everyone's small improvements add up to something very useful.
Fred
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1
Michael Hopcroft stated for the record:
I am wondering whether we are not all engaged in some gigantic folly that is destroying not only our own credibility but that of the Internet as a whole.
There will never be a method of communication that in itself is credible. Error and falsehood have never been difficult to convey in any medium.
In other words, teh Intarweb has never had any credibility.
Or at least has never deserved any, which I admit isn't exactly the same thing.
- -- Sean Barrett | Death of teh Intarweb eminent! sean@epoptic.com | Wikipedia article at 11!
On 7/21/06, Michael Hopcroft michael@mphpress.com wrote:
I am wondering whether we are not all engaged in some gigantic folly that is destroying not only our own credibility but that of the Internet as a whole.
We're also creating a giant black hole to suck in the contents of the entire universe.
Rob wrote:
On 7/21/06, Michael Hopcroft michael@mphpress.com wrote:
I am wondering whether we are not all engaged in some gigantic folly that is destroying not only our own credibility but that of the Internet as a whole.
We're also creating a giant black hole to suck in the contents of the entire universe.
And this is a good thing how, exactly?
My point remains -- what precisely is the point of research and writing an article that can be completely dismantled or deleted at whim by anyone with a dial-up connection and an ax to grind? And what is the point of reading a "factual" article whose contents change constantly even when the subject of the article does not? Novels and plays may be constantly re-interpreted, but only in an Orwellian world can they be un-written. Destroying every copy of a film that could conceivably exist does not mean the film was never made. An event that took place at a specific time in the past does not suddenly revert to not having taken place because people no longer want to think about it. You cannot unkill John Lennon., any more than you can entirely erase him from the past even if you somehow manage to destroy all traces of every note and word he ever sang, played or wrote. Yet someone could go to Wikipedia and, if he is especially unlucky and a vandal has been especially resourceful, he might find that the biographical article on John Lennon is an argument that there never was such a person and that the Beatles and their recordings never existed in the first place. Although hopefully the community would jump all over such blatant and irrational revisionism, the fact that such a thing is even conceivable is compelling argument against the concept of Wikipedia.
On 7/21/06, Michael Hopcroft michael@mphpress.com wrote: [snip]
My point remains -- what precisely is the point of research and writing an article that can be completely dismantled or deleted at whim by anyone with a dial-up connection and an ax to grind?
[snip]
We have developers on dial-up??
:)
Random folks on dialup can't delete anything. The text is still in the history. We do need to get better at making sure good work isn't lost in the history someplace, but we do rescue stuff all the time.
Obviously, we will do things over time to help ensure that quality articles don't regress (unless the folks that advocate Wikipedia as foremost a Wiki or, worse, a game of [[nomic]], win those arguments), but a lot is done already.
If you are uncomfortable contributing, then by all means: don't. But please keep in mind that there are enormous numbers of articles which are uncontroversial, where your content is unlikely to be contested or deleted by anyone, and where love and attention is much needed.
On 21/07/06, Michael Hopcroft michael@mphpress.com wrote:
My point remains -- what precisely is the point of research and writing an article that can be completely dismantled or deleted at whim by anyone with a dial-up connection and an ax to grind? And what is the point of reading a "factual" article whose contents change constantly even when the subject of the article does not? Novels and plays may be constantly re-interpreted, but only in an Orwellian world can they be un-written. Destroying every copy of a film that could conceivably exist does not mean the film was never made. An event that took place at a specific time in the past does not suddenly revert to not having taken place because people no longer want to think about it. You cannot unkill John Lennon., any more than you can entirely erase him from the past even if you somehow manage to destroy all traces of every note and word he ever sang, played or wrote. Yet someone could go to Wikipedia and, if he is especially unlucky and a vandal has been especially resourceful, he might find that the biographical article on John Lennon is an argument that there never was such a person and that the Beatles and their recordings never existed in the first place. Although hopefully the community would jump all over such blatant and irrational revisionism, the fact that such a thing is even conceivable is compelling argument against the concept of Wikipedia.
Perhaps the problem is that you need order. Wikipedia isn't fixed and predictable - it exists in an equilibrium. Luckily, it is such that enough good faith edits exist to keep the equilibrium in line with our aims.
If you aren't happy to contribute to something that is so unpredictable and changeable, then nothing can be done. This is Wikipedia.
Oldak Quill wrote:
On 21/07/06, Michael Hopcroft michael@mphpress.com wrote:
My point remains -- what precisely is the point of research and writing an article that can be completely dismantled or deleted at whim by anyone with a dial-up connection and an ax to grind? And what is the point of reading a "factual" article whose contents change constantly even when the subject of the article does not? Novels and plays may be constantly re-interpreted, but only in an Orwellian world can they be un-written. Destroying every copy of a film that could conceivably exist does not mean the film was never made. An event that took place at a specific time in the past does not suddenly revert to not having taken place because people no longer want to think about it. You cannot unkill John Lennon., any more than you can entirely erase him from the past even if you somehow manage to destroy all traces of every note and word he ever sang, played or wrote. Yet someone could go to Wikipedia and, if he is especially unlucky and a vandal has been especially resourceful, he might find that the biographical article on John Lennon is an argument that there never was such a person and that the Beatles and their recordings never existed in the first place. Although hopefully the community would jump all over such blatant and irrational revisionism, the fact that such a thing is even conceivable is compelling argument against the concept of Wikipedia.
Perhaps the problem is that you need order. Wikipedia isn't fixed and predictable - it exists in an equilibrium. Luckily, it is such that enough good faith edits exist to keep the equilibrium in line with our aims.
If you aren't happy to contribute to something that is so unpredictable and changeable, then nothing can be done. This is Wikipedia.
Nothing is forever. Every time the rock would roll back down the mountain Sisyphus would happily go back down to the bottom to restart the process. Eventually the Sun will burn itself out, and probably take out the earth with it, including Wikipedia. Life's like that.
Ec
On 7/21/06, Mark Wagner carnildo@gmail.com wrote: [snip]
Much of the image deletion policy is based around the fact that there are maybe a dozen people on Wikipedia who understand the image use policy well enough to enforce it, and are willing to take the time to do so. At the same time, over two thousand new images are uploaded each day, adding to the 553,000 images already on Wikipedia.
By making image uploading a privilege to be earned rather than a right conferred by registering an account, we can relax the policy and deal with uploaders individually, rather than automated notification of problems and nearly-automated deletion of problematic images.
I, too, have faced all the challenges that you mention in your email... I especially 'enjoy' watching someone play license template roulette. :-/ But I don't believe it would be wise to turn off image uploads.
What you say about copyright being hard is mostly true, but I think that what matters more than it being difficult is that it doesn't match up to people's natural instincts. They think "I got this off a webpage for free so it must be okay." or "No one will complain".
In any case, I think the worry about copyright is ignoring the real problem: WE DON'T HAVE ENOUGH PHOTOGRAPHERS! Even if we ignore the advantages of being able to work with the creator, when the copyright holder uploads their own content our problems are greatly reduced.
This is why so many of our problems are centered around images and not text... because while the copyright situation with text is fundimentally no different, there is little expectation by random folks that we'll accept text copied from elsewhere... as very little of Wikipedia text (esp pop culture stuff) is obviously copied from an outside source, while many of our images (esp pop culture stuff) do come from outside sources.
Go take a look at featured images on commons... Even most of the images there are found-on-the-web stuff, although they are (hopefully) free content found-on-the-web stuff.
So, as a result I'd be hesitant to support any measure which discouraged photographers from contributing, because I think that our habbit of using images from outside sources (free or not) is a huge part of the problem.
Perhaps we could look at doing something to shove new uploaders into a (web based) chat, which we could staff with half-clueful folks who could determine if the uploader understands, and set an upload permission bit? But the idea has a lot of challeges, such as how to staff the channel.
We could also replace the upload link in the standard public skin with an instruction page... and require people to redlink images in order to upload them. (This would reduce the huge number of images which spend their whole life orphaned, freeing up our resources.. and would require new uploaders to read a bit in order to figure it out).
Gregory Maxwell wrote:
In any case, I think the worry about copyright is ignoring the real problem: WE DON'T HAVE ENOUGH PHOTOGRAPHERS! Even if we ignore the advantages of being able to work with the creator, when the copyright holder uploads their own content our problems are greatly reduced.
Here's an evil hack - waive the one-month requirement if we see the image has metadata showing camera as the source...
But seriously, I'm not sure we can do much to encourage photography; it's like trying to get people to write about the Sphaerosepalaceae rather than Friends episodes.
Stan
On 7/21/06, Stan Shebs shebs@apple.com wrote:
Gregory Maxwell wrote:
In any case, I think the worry about copyright is ignoring the real problem: WE DON'T HAVE ENOUGH PHOTOGRAPHERS! Even if we ignore the advantages of being able to work with the creator, when the copyright holder uploads their own content our problems are greatly reduced.
Here's an evil hack - waive the one-month requirement if we see the image has metadata showing camera as the source...
That is an evil hack... mostly because it wouldn't be hard to implement.
But seriously, I'm not sure we can do much to encourage photography; it's like trying to get people to write about the Sphaerosepalaceae rather than Friends episodes.
Is it really the same thing?
Writing about Sphaerosepalaceae and Friends episodes both require real work.. both are creating content. The imbalance we see is because more people are interested in Friends. Photography isn't like that.... I'd agree it would be the same if I was lamenting the lack of illustrations on [[Sphaerosepalaceae]] verses [[Friends episode X]].
I've always regarded our lack of photographers as a product of the greater startup time consumption (can't really take half a picture), combined with our culture which isn't that friendly to photographers.
Gregory Maxwell wrote:
Writing about Sphaerosepalaceae and Friends episodes both require real work.. both are creating content. The imbalance we see is because more people are interested in Friends. Photography isn't like that.... I'd agree it would be the same if I was lamenting the lack of illustrations on [[Sphaerosepalaceae]] verses [[Friends episode X]].
The "more people" imbalance is what I meant. The great majority of editors work on what interests them personally, rather than taking guidance from somebody else, and that seems to extend to picture taking as well. Most of the WP photographers I know of tend to have an intense interest in one or a few areas, so for instance they'll upload photos of many kinds of cars, but no photos of the towns where they're finding the cars.
I've always regarded our lack of photographers as a product of the greater startup time consumption (can't really take half a picture), combined with our culture which isn't that friendly to photographers.
An unfriendly culture? Hadn't noticed that myself. My limiting factor is that it takes less than a minute to compose and shoot, but several minutes to crop and fix up, so I have a growing backlog... Another limiting factor is that taking "encyclopedic" rather than "art" pictures is a body of technique unto itself; for some things it can take major commitments of driving and/or walking around to get decent shot. Perhaps more people can find a free hour between 9 and 10 pm to sort stubs :-) than the same hour during daylight to take pictures of downtown buildings.
Stan
On 7/21/06, Stan Shebs shebs@apple.com wrote:
The "more people" imbalance is what I meant. The great majority of editors work on what interests them personally, rather than taking guidance from somebody else, and that seems to extend to picture taking as well. Most of the WP photographers I know of tend to have an intense interest in one or a few areas, so for instance they'll upload photos of many kinds of cars, but no photos of the towns where they're finding the cars.
We have people that work on submitting photos of cars? Where? I didn't even think we were doing so well as to have dedicated subject area photographers, with only a few exceptions.
I just checked the pages of several performance cars likely to be of interest and mostly found a mixture of unfree, "my car", and a few free snapshots. I didn't see any evidence of a dedicated subject area photographer on the few cars types I checked.
An unfriendly culture? Hadn't noticed that myself.
There can be no doubt after you've submitted a free photo only to have it replaced with an unfree photo that someone likes better... and being left to battle it out. :) We're too quick to acknowledge the work of someone who uploads a lot of found on the web, but too slow the recognize the work that goes into a quality piece of custom made work.
My limiting factor is that it takes less than a minute to compose and shoot, but several minutes to crop and fix up, so I have a growing backlog...
Minutes? Haha. Minutes is the same order of work as making a non-minor article edit. I'm happy when I'm able to pull off four quality images of a subject with three hours work from start to finish.
Yes, photography represents a sharp upfront investment and we don't respect it accordingly because we're too oriented around folks who provide images by operating google image search.
Another limiting factor is that taking "encyclopedic" rather than "art" pictures is a body of technique unto itself; for some things it can take major commitments of driving and/or walking around to get decent shot.
Yes, this is quite true... and it is the biggest reason why we need to move away from relying on outside sources for illustrations.
Perhaps more people can find a free hour between 9 and 10 pm to sort stubs :-) than the same hour during daylight to take pictures of downtown buildings.
I don't disagree about the resource challenges... But the fact remains that there are many thousands of people submitting photos to flikr or contest sites like dpchallenge (http://www.dpchallenge.com/challenge_archive.php). Obviously there are folks out there who *are* taking pictures, we need to pull them into the fold and get them taking pictures we need licensed in a way that we can use. :)
Today, we grab free images from sites like Flikr and don't even contact the photographer... What a tremendous opportunity to bring in more photographers. But it seems that, as a whole, Wikipedia is not that interested in attracting photographers.
Gregory Maxwell wrote:
We have people that work on submitting photos of cars? Where? I didn't even think we were doing so well as to have dedicated subject area photographers, with only a few exceptions.
There's been a whole slew on commons recently, I'm sure some haven't made it to en: articles yet. It's still pretty easy to go through a random commons gallery or category and find dozens of en: articles not using the pictures already there.
An unfriendly culture? Hadn't noticed that myself.
There can be no doubt after you've submitted a free photo only to have it replaced with an unfree photo that someone likes better... and being left to battle it out. :)
I don't recall that ever happening to me - it would be infuriating. "Oops sorry, just a coincidence that I permablocked you and reverted all your edits right after you replaced my image..." :-)
I don't disagree about the resource challenges... But the fact remains that there are many thousands of people submitting photos to flikr or contest sites like dpchallenge (http://www.dpchallenge.com/challenge_archive.php). Obviously there are folks out there who *are* taking pictures, we need to pull them into the fold and get them taking pictures we need licensed in a way that we can use. :)
Good point! Have we ever actually asked? Perhaps we could start by making a public statement - it's only very recently that Google has even indexed any of our images, so I imagine that few people even know we have a free image repository, let alone that they can contribute to it.
Stan
On 7/21/06, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
On 7/21/06, Stan Shebs shebs@apple.com wrote: We have people that work on submitting photos of cars? Where? I didn't even think we were doing so well as to have dedicated subject area photographers, with only a few exceptions.
I've taken photos of a great number of cars for Wikipedia, but frankly I got a little burned out by it. Partly because of the number of times I've seen someone remove my picture or someone else's freely licensed picture in favor of a dubiously 'fair use' manufacturer's promo photo.
I've even been quite bitched out by some people for even suggesting that we should prefer user-contributed and freely-licensed pictures - because user photos are 'unprofessional-looking' and might represent the vehicle in a poor light because they don't show it perfect and factory new.
I'm an old-time editor, and know these people are wrong and full of crap. It just tires me. But imagine how a newcomer might feel.
An unfriendly culture? Hadn't noticed that myself.
There can be no doubt after you've submitted a free photo only to have it replaced with an unfree photo that someone likes better... and being left to battle it out. :) We're too quick to acknowledge the work of someone who uploads a lot of found on the web, but too slow the recognize the work that goes into a quality piece of custom made work.
Exactly what I just said above ... and it's a very valid and very real problem ...
Yes, photography represents a sharp upfront investment and we don't respect it accordingly because we're too oriented around folks who provide images by operating google image search.
<AOL>
Today, we grab free images from sites like Flikr and don't even contact the photographer... What a tremendous opportunity to bring in more photographers. But it seems that, as a whole, Wikipedia is not that interested in attracting photographers.
Whenever I use a photographer's work from Flickr or anywhere else (CC-licensed, etc) I try and leave a comment on their photo. Generally it's much appreciated.
I think a big mistake in our Flickr-sifting efforts is that we provide no feedback to those whose photos we use. Perhaps just because it's easier not to or something, but comments are encouragement, and people who free-license stuff generally like to hear that stuff is appreciated.
-Matt
Matt Brown wrote:
On 7/21/06, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
On 7/21/06, Stan Shebs shebs@apple.com wrote: We have people that work on submitting photos of cars? Where? I didn't even think we were doing so well as to have dedicated subject area photographers, with only a few exceptions.
I've taken photos of a great number of cars for Wikipedia, but frankly I got a little burned out by it. Partly because of the number of times I've seen someone remove my picture or someone else's freely licensed picture in favor of a dubiously 'fair use' manufacturer's promo photo.
Hmph, back when I was spending more time on fair use, I was evaporating any unfree image that had a replacement, but that doesn't prevent re-uploads I guess. Shouldn't be *anybody* uploading unfree images to replace free ones, sounds like some user spanking is in order.
Stan
Matt Brown wrote:
On 7/21/06, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
<snip>
Today, we grab free images from sites like Flikr and don't even contact the photographer... What a tremendous opportunity to bring in more photographers. But it seems that, as a whole, Wikipedia is not that interested in attracting photographers.
Whenever I use a photographer's work from Flickr or anywhere else (CC-licensed, etc) I try and leave a comment on their photo. Generally it's much appreciated.
I think a big mistake in our Flickr-sifting efforts is that we provide no feedback to those whose photos we use. Perhaps just because it's easier not to or something, but comments are encouragement, and people who free-license stuff generally like to hear that stuff is appreciated.
What particularly irks me about Flickr is that people can change the licenses on their photos; I came across a Featured Picture on Commons the other day which had been uploaded in December 2005, tagged as CC-BY-SA 2.0, had been uploaded to Flickr in November 2005, but when I viewed the photo in July 2006 the tag on Flickr was CC-NC-ND 2.0. The worst part is that the image on Flickr has no "history" page, and the Internet Archive doesn't have the page, so there's no way I can verify that the image was indeed tagged that way when it was uploaded to Commons.
On 7/26/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) alphasigmax@gmail.com wrote:
What particularly irks me about Flickr is that people can change the licenses on their photos; I came across a Featured Picture on Commons the other day which had been uploaded in December 2005, tagged as CC-BY-SA 2.0, had been uploaded to Flickr in November 2005, but when I viewed the photo in July 2006 the tag on Flickr was CC-NC-ND 2.0. The worst part is that the image on Flickr has no "history" page, and the Internet Archive doesn't have the page, so there's no way I can verify that the image was indeed tagged that way when it was uploaded to Commons.
Even more unfortunately, enough people upload stuff with the wrong license that we can't just assume the stated license was actually correct at upload time, either.
-Matt
On 7/27/06, Matt Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
On 7/26/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) alphasigmax@gmail.com wrote:
What particularly irks me about Flickr is that people can change the licenses on their photos; I came across a Featured Picture on Commons the other day which had been uploaded in December 2005, tagged as CC-BY-SA 2.0, had been uploaded to Flickr in November 2005, but when I viewed the photo in July 2006 the tag on Flickr was CC-NC-ND 2.0. The worst part is that the image on Flickr has no "history" page, and the Internet Archive doesn't have the page, so there's no way I can verify that the image was indeed tagged that way when it was uploaded to
Commons.
Even more unfortunately, enough people upload stuff with the wrong license that we can't just assume the stated license was actually correct at upload time, either.
-Matt
Luckily that is often (but not always) quite obvious.
Concerning the more restrictive license. Isn't there a rule in Creative Commons that you can't change from a more open to a more restricted license? If so, maybe we or CC should mail flickr and see if we get a response.
Garion
On 7/27/06, Garion96 garion96@gmail.com wrote:
Luckily that is often (but not always) quite obvious.
Concerning the more restrictive license. Isn't there a rule in Creative Commons that you can't change from a more open to a more restricted license? If so, maybe we or CC should mail flickr and see if we get a response.
Garion
I'm unclear who the "you" is here. If the you is the original copyright holder (remember, except in PD cases, licensing out your work under CC licenses and such does not strip you of your copyright), then they certainly can do that, relicense as what they like. Ex. you could relicense all your Wikipedia GFDL edits to whatever the cool GFDL-compatible CC alphabet soup license is ''du jour'', or to a BSD license. And then the next day you could decide to simply go public domain. People can still still your edits as GFDL from when they were GFDL and so on. If it's someone else, well, that depends on the license. Take BSD again; it famously allows proprietary forks, taking code to a more restrictive license. Such a possibility is open for derivative works under certain CC licenses AFAIK.
~maru
Alphax (Wikipedia email) wrote:
Matt Brown wrote:
On 7/21/06, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
<snip>
Today, we grab free images from sites like Flikr and don't even contact the photographer... What a tremendous opportunity to bring in more photographers. But it seems that, as a whole, Wikipedia is not that interested in attracting photographers.
Whenever I use a photographer's work from Flickr or anywhere else (CC-licensed, etc) I try and leave a comment on their photo. Generally it's much appreciated.
I think a big mistake in our Flickr-sifting efforts is that we provide no feedback to those whose photos we use. Perhaps just because it's easier not to or something, but comments are encouragement, and people who free-license stuff generally like to hear that stuff is appreciated.
What particularly irks me about Flickr is that people can change the licenses on their photos; I came across a Featured Picture on Commons the other day which had been uploaded in December 2005, tagged as CC-BY-SA 2.0, had been uploaded to Flickr in November 2005, but when I viewed the photo in July 2006 the tag on Flickr was CC-NC-ND 2.0. The worst part is that the image on Flickr has no "history" page, and the Internet Archive doesn't have the page, so there's no way I can verify that the image was indeed tagged that way when it was uploaded to Commons.
This all comes down to a question of proof. One needs to assume if the use of the photograph was legal at the time that it was used that use and all downstream uses that derive from it will continue to be legal. The downstream user will probably need to establish the chain of provenance in the event of a legal dispute. It would be his responsibility to trace up the food chain to establish the freeness of the material.
For us, we probably need to be a bit more thorough in documenting our usage, particularly noting the date and time the material was taken. This may require archiving a download of a status file from Flickr.
Ec
On 7/27/06, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Alphax (Wikipedia email) wrote:
What particularly irks me about Flickr is that people can change the licenses on their photos; I came across a Featured Picture on Commons the other day which had been uploaded in December 2005, tagged as CC-BY-SA 2.0, had been uploaded to Flickr in November 2005, but when I viewed the photo in July 2006 the tag on Flickr was CC-NC-ND 2.0. The worst part is that the image on Flickr has no "history" page, and the Internet Archive doesn't have the page, so there's no way I can verify that the image was indeed tagged that way when it was uploaded to Commons.
This all comes down to a question of proof. One needs to assume if the use of the photograph was legal at the time that it was used that use and all downstream uses that derive from it will continue to be legal. The downstream user will probably need to establish the chain of provenance in the event of a legal dispute. It would be his responsibility to trace up the food chain to establish the freeness of the material.
For us, we probably need to be a bit more thorough in documenting our usage, particularly noting the date and time the material was taken. This may require archiving a download of a status file from Flickr.
I seriously doubt proof is going to help in a situation like this. There are so many other factors involved. Was the person who uploaded the file to Flickr actually the copyright holder? Who was the license granted to? Can the license be revoked? Was the uploader of legal age to grant the license?
If someone releases something under a free license and then changes his or her mind later, 99 times out of 100 the best solution is to just find replacement content. It's just too much of a grey area legally.
Anthony
Anthony wrote:
On 7/27/06, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Alphax (Wikipedia email) wrote:
What particularly irks me about Flickr is that people can change the licenses on their photos; I came across a Featured Picture on Commons the other day which had been uploaded in December 2005, tagged as CC-BY-SA 2.0, had been uploaded to Flickr in November 2005, but when I viewed the photo in July 2006 the tag on Flickr was CC-NC-ND 2.0. The worst part is that the image on Flickr has no "history" page, and the Internet Archive doesn't have the page, so there's no way I can verify that the image was indeed tagged that way when it was uploaded to Commons.
This all comes down to a question of proof. One needs to assume if the use of the photograph was legal at the time that it was used that use and all downstream uses that derive from it will continue to be legal. The downstream user will probably need to establish the chain of provenance in the event of a legal dispute. It would be his responsibility to trace up the food chain to establish the freeness of the material.
For us, we probably need to be a bit more thorough in documenting our usage, particularly noting the date and time the material was taken. This may require archiving a download of a status file from Flickr.
I seriously doubt proof is going to help in a situation like this. There are so many other factors involved. Was the person who uploaded the file to Flickr actually the copyright holder? Who was the license granted to? Can the license be revoked? Was the uploader of legal age to grant the license?
If someone releases something under a free license and then changes his or her mind later, 99 times out of 100 the best solution is to just find replacement content. It's just too much of a grey area legally.
For the sake of argument about a specific aspect of copyright we need to hold the other factors constant. It then goes without saying that if the rights to use the material failed for other reasons that could render the revocability argument moot.
Ec
Hi,
Our current setup does mean that it is much, much easier for someone to upload an unfree image than it is for someone to delete it. This makes sense when it comes to valuable freely-licensed content, but is not ideal when it comes to the "I found this image somewhere on the web and slapped a fair use template on it" images. But there are drawbacks to adding more hoops to jump through in the upload process, as pointed out by Gregory Maxwell and others here -- we don't want to make it any more difficult for people to contribute their original work.
Another technical solution might be to impose terrible resolution on unfree images, which itself could be switched off (perhaps by bureaucrats) when there is a real need to (as, for instance, with the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons). If the default was for unfree content to be less aesthetically appealing than freely-licensed content, we wouldn't have editors constantly replacing freely-licensed images with unfreely-licensed ones.
Incidentally,
I've always regarded our lack of photographers as a product of the greater startup time consumption (can't really take half a picture), combined with our culture which isn't that friendly to photographers.
An unfriendly culture? Hadn't noticed that myself.
At en we have proven largely willing to say to photographers that their work is not valued. We pay a kind of lip service to how great it is to have freely-licensed material, but it is regularly replaced by more professional-looking images found elsewhere on the web under a "fair use" claim. That would certainly suggest that doing photography for en is not worth one's time.
Jkelly
jkelly@fas.harvard.edu wrote:
At en we have proven largely willing to say to photographers that their work is not valued. We pay a kind of lip service to how great it is to have freely-licensed material, but it is regularly replaced by more professional-looking images found elsewhere on the web under a "fair use" claim. That would certainly suggest that doing photography for en is not worth one's time.
I'm still a little mystified by this claim. To date I've uploaded about 2,000 of my own photos, and I can't recall a single article where one of my photos has been replaced by a nonfree image. On the contrary, I see my pics showing up unexpectedly in additional articles. That's not to say replacement doesn't happen, no mechanism to notify if it did, but when I spot-check, I don't see anything going on. So where exactly is all this replacement with nonfree happening?
Stan
Quoting Stan Shebs shebs@apple.com:
anything going on. So where exactly is all this replacement with nonfree happening?
I replied to this offlist, so as to avoid creating a thread about who did what when, but I thought that this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk%3APublicity_photos&...
...which I summarise as "Jimbo Wales doesn't know what the point of Wikipedia is", is indicative of the kind of thinking that is going on around unfree content.
Jkelly
On 7/31/06, jkelly@fas.harvard.edu jkelly@fas.harvard.edu wrote:
Quoting Stan Shebs shebs@apple.com:
anything going on. So where exactly is all this replacement with nonfree happening?
I replied to this offlist, so as to avoid creating a thread about who did what when, but I thought that this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk%3APublicity_photos&...
...which I summarise as "Jimbo Wales doesn't know what the point of Wikipedia is", is indicative of the kind of thinking that is going on around unfree content.
Jkelly
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Amen
Wasn't that username connected to userbox fiasco? or was it with some of the friend ishcommunities?
On 7/31/06, Stan Shebs shebs@apple.com wrote:
I'm still a little mystified by this claim. To date I've uploaded about 2,000 of my own photos, and I can't recall a single article where one of my photos has been replaced by a nonfree image. On the contrary, I see my pics showing up unexpectedly in additional articles. That's not to say replacement doesn't happen, no mechanism to notify if it did, but when I spot-check, I don't see anything going on. So where exactly is all this replacement with nonfree happening?
Unfortunately this is common on some articles, especially the pop culture stuff. In some articles the lead pic is different every week with fans switching it out for their new favorite, in others I've seen clear public domain pics replaced with fuzzy screenshots.
Rob wrote:
On 7/31/06, Stan Shebs shebs@apple.com wrote:
I'm still a little mystified by this claim. To date I've uploaded about 2,000 of my own photos, and I can't recall a single article where one of my photos has been replaced by a nonfree image. On the contrary, I see my pics showing up unexpectedly in additional articles. That's not to say replacement doesn't happen, no mechanism to notify if it did, but when I spot-check, I don't see anything going on. So where exactly is all this replacement with nonfree happening?
Unfortunately this is common on some articles, especially the pop culture stuff. In some articles the lead pic is different every week with fans switching it out for their new favorite, in others I've seen clear public domain pics replaced with fuzzy screenshots.
I suppose if I were a more dutiful Wikipedian, I'd go take pictures of all the celebrities passing through Vegas, but truthfully, vegetables still seem more interesting! :-)
In a way, what we want is some mechanism for the very existence of a free picture to somehow prevent uploads of nonfree equivalents. Although we can't necessarily stop the editing, we could perhaps have a bot that knows which free pictures go with which articles (for instance, a template in the image page), then auto-reverts replaces of free with nonfree, and marks nonfree for deletion. The process needs to run faster than human editing in any case.
Stan
On 8/1/06, Stan Shebs shebs@apple.com wrote:
Unfortunately this is common on some articles, especially the pop culture stuff. In some articles the lead pic is different every week with fans switching it out for their new favorite, in others I've seen clear public domain pics replaced with fuzzy screenshots.
I suppose if I were a more dutiful Wikipedian, I'd go take pictures of all the celebrities passing through Vegas, but truthfully, vegetables still seem more interesting! :-)
There are enough celebrity photographers in Los Angeles to last a lifetime of free images if we could set up a rapport with them to release some of their less-likely-to-be-commercially-viable images under free licenses. Free exposure and circulation for them, free images for us. I don't see how they'd have anything to lose (and it is not as if the places they would sell their photos to regularly are going to suddenly want to re-license their whole magazine as CC-BY-SA either, so the odds of it even competing with their regular business is pretty low).
It'd be great if we could do some sort of photo drive. I have a feeling there are lots of photographers out there who wouldn't mind releasing a few of their pics to WP under a CC-BY-SA license if we could just put the question to them directly.
FF
On 8/3/06, Fastfission fastfission@gmail.com wrote:
There are enough celebrity photographers in Los Angeles to last a lifetime of free images if we could set up a rapport with them to release some of their less-likely-to-be-commercially-viable images under free licenses. Free exposure and circulation for them, free images for us. I don't see how they'd have anything to lose (and it is not as if the places they would sell their photos to regularly are going to suddenly want to re-license their whole magazine as CC-BY-SA either, so the odds of it even competing with their regular business is pretty low).
That actually sounds fairly plausible. I'm an expert on LA paparazzi after having seen a half-hour documentary on them. One thing I recall was that a good clean photo doing something fairly controversial (eg, drunk outside a club) was worth in the $500 range. A shot of a celebrity just not wanting to be shot was like $100, and a posed celebrity shot was like $50 or less. And all this is presuming that the photos would be published in the week or so afterwards.
The chances of a photographer having old (2-3 years), boring, plain "Hi, my name is Paris Hilton" shots lying around that they would hand over for "not much" sounds pretty good to me. We just need to work out what exactly we can offer them in return.
To that end, we could improve our crediting system. We could explicitly say "Wikipedia thanks the following professional photographers for their graceful contributions". I don't believe that would be at all contradictory to our mission.
Steve
On 03/08/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
That actually sounds fairly plausible. I'm an expert on LA paparazzi after having seen a half-hour documentary on them.
Lol.
To that end, we could improve our crediting system. We could explicitly say "Wikipedia thanks the following professional photographers for their graceful contributions". I don't believe that would be at all contradictory to our mission.
Where are you proposing this is written? I could imagine us puting photo credits in image captions...
On 8/3/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
That actually sounds fairly plausible. I'm an expert on LA paparazzi after having seen a half-hour documentary on them. One thing I recall was that a good clean photo doing something fairly controversial (eg, drunk outside a club) was worth in the $500 range. A shot of a celebrity just not wanting to be shot was like $100, and a posed celebrity shot was like $50 or less. And all this is presuming that the photos would be published in the week or so afterwards.
The chances of a photographer having old (2-3 years), boring, plain "Hi, my name is Paris Hilton" shots lying around that they would hand over for "not much" sounds pretty good to me. We just need to work out what exactly we can offer them in return.
To that end, we could improve our crediting system. We could explicitly say "Wikipedia thanks the following professional photographers for their graceful contributions". I don't believe that would be at all contradictory to our mission.
The only problem there is that it treats the "professionals" in a different category than the "amateurs", which I think it somewhat against the philosophy of the place. If WP allows "professionals" to have their name listed (and with a link to their website?), why wouldn't it let "amateurs" list theirs on the same page? Pretty soon it could also devolve into a spam page, the only requirement being contribution of a photograph.
Maybe that's not a problem, though. At least there would be SOME requirement. Actually, perhaps one could set the requirement -- contribute photographs to Wikipedia which can (and are) used in articles and you get to put your name and link on a page for contributing photographers. I don't know if anyone would go for that (either Wikipedians or photographers). It's somewhat of an equivalent of selling ad space, except services rather than money would be transacted. Might be a bad precedent, might lead to some unpleasant arguments ("I contributed 5 pictures of my rear to Wikipedia for the 'buttocks' page, why can't I list my website here?"). Just thinking out loud here.
But even without a centralized credit facility we could make it easy for photographers to quickly set up Flickr-like user pages for themselves where they would have their contact information, a link to their web page, and a list of all free photos they've uploaded to Wikipedia and what articles they are used in. If we set up easy-to-use templates for this it might make it look even more attractive. We could remind them how high a pagerank Wikipedia has, and that their photograph would be used in an article which showed up on the first Google search page in most cases.
I think we have a lot to offer in terms of exposure and attention, even without modifying our system one bit. If we found some way to send a "Hey, want to contribute some of your old, unused photos to Wikipedia?" message around, perhaps it work on its own merit, if it was worded well and presented the pros and cons in a straightforward, no-B.S. fashion.
What they have to gain: free exposure on a high-pagerank, high-traffic site with a professional apperance (no pop-up ads); regular contributors would be more than welcome to have a link to their own website listed on their userpage along with samples of their contributed images.
What they have to lose: very little -- releasing under a viral license like CC-BY-SA would not only require attribution for re-use, but would require all re-use to be itself licensed under a free license, which their normal clientele would not be doing, so they are not competing against themselves; the pictures are likely not going to be doing much sitting at the back of their files gathering dust, and pictures which would be too "boring" for professional use would actually be potentially ideal for Wikipedia, which is somewhat anti-sensationalistic.
FF
Fastfission wrote:
But even without a centralized credit facility we could make it easy for photographers to quickly set up Flickr-like user pages for themselves where they would have their contact information, a link to their web page, and a list of all free photos they've uploaded to Wikipedia and what articles they are used in. If we set up easy-to-use templates for this it might make it look even more attractive. We could remind them how high a pagerank Wikipedia has, and that their photograph would be used in an article which showed up on the first Google search page in most cases.
This fits perfectly into commons' architecture, and indeed several professionals already have their own dedicated galleries and/or categories there.
What would be a good attention-getting conduit? Used to be, you could get the attention of lots of nerds by just spa^H^H^Hposting to Usenet. What do photographers look at?
I wonder if a classified-type ad in a print magazine would be noticed...
Stan
On 8/3/06, Stan Shebs shebs@apple.com wrote:
But even without a centralized credit facility we could make it easy for photographers to quickly set up Flickr-like user pages for themselves where they would have their contact information, a link to their web page, and a list of all free photos they've uploaded to Wikipedia and what articles they are used in. If we set up easy-to-use templates for this it might make it look even more attractive. We could remind them how high a pagerank Wikipedia has, and that their photograph would be used in an article which showed up on the first Google search page in most cases.
This fits perfectly into commons' architecture, and indeed several professionals already have their own dedicated galleries and/or categories there.
What would be a good attention-getting conduit? Used to be, you could get the attention of lots of nerds by just spa^H^H^Hposting to Usenet. What do photographers look at?
I wonder if a classified-type ad in a print magazine would be noticed...
We should probably try and contact some of the professionals who already do contribute to Wikimedia projects and see what they think about it. They probably will have useful ideas and observations about such an arrangement, and would help concretize any proposals (they'll know what they read, they'll know whether professionals really do keep dusty photos of Paris Hilton around, and they'll know what their professional copyright concerns are). As it is we're flying blind.
FF
On 8/4/06, Fastfission fastfission@gmail.com wrote:
The only problem there is that it treats the "professionals" in a different category than the "amateurs", which I think it somewhat against the philosophy of the place. If WP allows "professionals" to have their name listed (and with a link to their website?), why wouldn't it let "amateurs" list theirs on the same page? Pretty soon
I think it's reasonable to distinguish people who do X for a living, but have chosen to do X for free for us, and people who do Y for a living, but have chosen to do X as a hobby. In some ways it's a much greater sacrifice for a professional to work for free.
More pragmatically, amateurs don't need much encouragement to work for us. I contribute photos to Wikipedia because I enjoy it, and because I want to - not for any kind of recognition. Also, since "amateurs" are Wikipedia community members, there are other ways of recognising them internally - talk page messages work well. "Professionals" come from outside the Wikipedia community, so should be recognised in a more external way.
it could also devolve into a spam page, the only requirement being contribution of a photograph.
Let's not be unnecessarily pessimistic.
Maybe that's not a problem, though. At least there would be SOME requirement. Actually, perhaps one could set the requirement -- contribute photographs to Wikipedia which can (and are) used in articles and you get to put your name and link on a page for contributing photographers. I don't know if anyone would go for that (either Wikipedians or photographers). It's somewhat of an equivalent of selling ad space, except services rather than money would be transacted. Might be a bad precedent, might lead to some unpleasant arguments ("I contributed 5 pictures of my rear to Wikipedia for the 'buttocks' page, why can't I list my website here?"). Just thinking out loud here.
It should best be managed with discretion. Phrasing it as "Contribute X, gain the right to Y" is definitely the wrong way. Phrasing it as "We are grateful to X, of yyy.com for his many photos" is better. No rights, no exchange, just gratitude.
But even without a centralized credit facility we could make it easy for photographers to quickly set up Flickr-like user pages for themselves where they would have their contact information, a link to their web page, and a list of all free photos they've uploaded to Wikipedia and what articles they are used in. If we set up easy-to-use templates for this it might make it look even more attractive. We could remind them how high a pagerank Wikipedia has, and that their photograph would be used in an article which showed up on the first Google search page in most cases.
Yeah, that's really not a bad idea. We would want to keep some controls on it if people are coming to Wikipedia specifiaclly for this, like ensuring that they only put pictures up which are genuinely useful to us, and toning down the spam/advertising aspects of it.
I think we have a lot to offer in terms of exposure and attention, even without modifying our system one bit. If we found some way to send a "Hey, want to contribute some of your old, unused photos to Wikipedia?" message around, perhaps it work on its own merit, if it was worded well and presented the pros and cons in a straightforward, no-B.S. fashion.
Yeah, I can't say I've ever seen any advertising for contributors to Wikipedia. Even popping around sites like flickr or photobucket or whatever and spreading the word would be handy. There are a lot of good amateur photographers out there looking for exposure.
What they have to lose: very little -- releasing under a viral license like CC-BY-SA would not only require attribution for re-use, but would require all re-use to be itself licensed under a free license, which their normal clientele would not be doing, so they are not competing against themselves; the pictures are likely not going to be doing much sitting at the back of their files gathering dust, and pictures which would be too "boring" for professional use would actually be potentially ideal for Wikipedia, which is somewhat anti-sensationalistic.
Yeah, and they can always upload them at like 1500px and still try and sell higher res photos for printing if they really want. Not ideal, but not terrible.
Steve
On 8/4/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
I think it's reasonable to distinguish people who do X for a living, but have chosen to do X for free for us, and people who do Y for a living, but have chosen to do X as a hobby. In some ways it's a much greater sacrifice for a professional to work for free.
I don't necessarily disagree, but this does ride the line between "thanking someone for professional-grade work" and "valuing someone for their accreditation as a proxy for valuing their content". If that makes sense.
More pragmatically, amateurs don't need much encouragement to work for us. I contribute photos to Wikipedia because I enjoy it, and because I want to - not for any kind of recognition. Also, since "amateurs" are Wikipedia community members, there are other ways of recognising them internally - talk page messages work well. "Professionals" come from outside the Wikipedia community, so should be recognised in a more external way.
Just the same, we want to make sure we don't end up looking like we undervalue "amateur" contributions either, since they no doubt make up the bulk of our contributions. Making a big hub-bub because someone is willing to donate the scraps of their day-job to Wikipedia might rub some the wrong way, if you get what I'm saying.
Again, I don't necessarily disagree that there aren't reasons to encourage professionals, I'm just saying it's something I'd want to tread carefully when it comes to even "expressing gratitude". A lot of contributors here are very anti-authority (in a broad sense, not just in the limited sense of state power) and one of the key aspects of Wikipedia's content model is that you don't need any sort of accreditation to participate.
That being said, there would be advantages to emphasizing professional contributions as well. Aside from potentially attracting people who can contribute very high quality content without much difficulty, it could also raise the status of Wikipedia in the professional world (I've seen lots of discussions between academics where they deride Wikipedia's content as "amateur hour" without knowing that lots of academics contribute to Wikipedia).
Though as we all know just because someone is professional does not make them a good contributor (in the case of academics, it may just encourage them to throw their hands up and say "I'm sick of arguing with these idiots! Don't they know I'm a professor?", which I've seen happen a few times. That's not meant to be an anti-academic comment, but I think that most academics don't spend very much time trying to explain themselves to people outside of their specific disciplines, are not used to people challenging their authority or doubting what is considered in their line of work to be a basic fact, and as a consequence don't deal with "free for all" settings like Wikipedia very well), and we should not hold our breath for the majority professionals to endorse Wikipedia (it will never really happen, not as long as "edit this page" remains).
FF
On 8/1/06, Stan Shebs shebs@apple.com wrote:
I'm still a little mystified by this claim. To date I've uploaded about 2,000 of my own photos, and I can't recall a single article
Holy crap. 2000??? I've nearly uploaded 100 and was proud of *that* achievement!!!
You're not the guy who has hundreds of photos of train stations across the UK are you? :)
where one of my photos has been replaced by a nonfree image. On the contrary, I see my pics showing up unexpectedly in additional articles. That's not to say replacement doesn't happen, no
I love it when that happens. A photo I took turned up unexpectedly as the lead photo at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_Singapore
Steve
Steve Bennett wrote:
On 8/1/06, Stan Shebs shebs@apple.com wrote:
I'm still a little mystified by this claim. To date I've uploaded about 2,000 of my own photos, and I can't recall a single article
Holy crap. 2000??? I've nearly uploaded 100 and was proud of *that* achievement!!!
You're not the guy who has hundreds of photos of train stations across the UK are you? :)
Heh, my productivity machine is botanical gardens. Photo of label, whole plant, closeups of leaves/flowers, three steps to the left, repeat. :-) UC Berkeley botanical garden sez they have 12,000 taxa for instance, I've only racked up about 300 of them so far...
Stan
On 8/1/06, Stan Shebs shebs@apple.com wrote:
Steve Bennett wrote:
On 8/1/06, Stan Shebs shebs@apple.com wrote:
I'm still a little mystified by this claim. To date I've uploaded about 2,000 of my own photos, and I can't recall a single article
Holy crap. 2000??? I've nearly uploaded 100 and was proud of *that* achievement!!!
You're not the guy who has hundreds of photos of train stations across the UK are you? :)
Heh, my productivity machine is botanical gardens. Photo of label, whole plant, closeups of leaves/flowers, three steps to the left, repeat. :-) UC Berkeley botanical garden sez they have 12,000 taxa for instance, I've only racked up about 300 of them so far...
Stan
zOMG, plant-cruft and photo-countitis!
~maru
On 8/1/06, maru dubshinki marudubshinki@gmail.com wrote:
zOMG, plant-cruft and photo-countitis!
~maru
As long as photo-countitis is limted to free images I fail to see an problem in encourageing competition.
On 8/1/06, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
As long as photo-countitis is limted to free images I fail to see an problem in encourageing competition.
Yeah I was thinking we could award people tokens for their user page for every 50 photos they've taken and uploaded. I wonder how many people are over the 1000 mark?
Steve
On 8/1/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 8/1/06, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
As long as photo-countitis is limted to free images I fail to see an problem in encourageing competition.
Yeah I was thinking we could award people tokens for their user page for every 50 photos they've taken and uploaded. I wonder how many people are over the 1000 mark?
Steve
With mass bot uploads from US gov websites and the like quite a few.
If that were doable, it'd be great to inforce that "fair use images must be low resolutions" I've seen several megapixel "fair use" images
On 7/31/06, jkelly@fas.harvard.edu jkelly@fas.harvard.edu wrote:
Hi,
Our current setup does mean that it is much, much easier for someone to upload an unfree image than it is for someone to delete it. This makes sense when it comes to valuable freely-licensed content, but is not ideal when it comes to the "I found this image somewhere on the web and slapped a fair use template on it" images. But there are drawbacks to adding more hoops to jump through in the upload process, as pointed out by Gregory Maxwell and others here -- we don't want to make it any more difficult for people to contribute their original work.
Another technical solution might be to impose terrible resolution on unfree images, which itself could be switched off (perhaps by bureaucrats) when there is a real need to (as, for instance, with the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons). If the default was for unfree content to be less aesthetically appealing than freely-licensed content, we wouldn't have editors constantly replacing freely-licensed images with unfreely-licensed ones.
Incidentally,
I've always regarded our lack of photographers as a product of the greater startup time consumption (can't really take half a picture), combined with our culture which isn't that friendly to photographers.
An unfriendly culture? Hadn't noticed that myself.
At en we have proven largely willing to say to photographers that their work is not valued. We pay a kind of lip service to how great it is to have freely-licensed material, but it is regularly replaced by more professional-looking images found elsewhere on the web under a "fair use" claim. That would certainly suggest that doing photography for en is not worth one's time.
Jkelly
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
On 7/31/06, jkelly@fas.harvard.edu jkelly@fas.harvard.edu wrote:
Hi,
Our current setup does mean that it is much, much easier for someone to upload an unfree image than it is for someone to delete it.
We need to turn A8 into G8.
On 7/31/06, jkelly@fas.harvard.edu jkelly@fas.harvard.edu wrote:
At en we have proven largely willing to say to photographers that their work is not valued. We pay a kind of lip service to how great it is to have freely-licensed material, but it is regularly replaced by more professional-looking images found elsewhere on the web under a "fair use" claim. That would certainly suggest that doing photography for en is not worth one's time.
Jkelly
I concur with this statement. I found a free image one time, put it on the article, it was reverted a few times until finally the fair use image was deleted (7 days orphan). Of course then the fair use image was again uploaded, some story again. :) Currently it seems to be stable.
And this was not an image I made, just one I found so I don't mind that much. But if an editor was the photographer of that image (put way more time into it, making the photograph etc) I really can imagine he would be extremely discouraged by the whole ordeal.
Garion96
On 8/1/06, Garion96 garion96@gmail.com wrote:
I concur with this statement. I found a free image one time, put it on the article, it was reverted a few times until finally the fair use image was deleted (7 days orphan). Of course then the fair use image was again uploaded, some story again. :) Currently it seems to be stable.
So what exactly is our policy that says that free images are vastly preferable, even when their quality is lower or they are less appropriate for the specific article?
Steve
On 8/1/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 8/1/06, Garion96 garion96@gmail.com wrote:
I concur with this statement. I found a free image one time, put it on
the
article, it was reverted a few times until finally the fair use image
was
deleted (7 days orphan). Of course then the fair use image was again uploaded, some story again. :) Currently it seems to be stable.
So what exactly is our policy that says that free images are vastly preferable, even when their quality is lower or they are less appropriate for the specific article?
Steve
Copied from the policy [[Wikipedia:Fair use criteria]] Criteria 1.
Always use a more free alternative if one is available. Such images can often be used more readily outside the U.S. If you see a fair use image and know of an alternative more free equivalent, please replace it, so the Wikipedia can become as free as possible. Eventually we may have a way to identify images as more restricted than GFDL on the article pages, to make the desire for a more free image more obvious.
Garion96
On 8/1/06, Garion96 garion96@gmail.com wrote:
Copied from the policy [[Wikipedia:Fair use criteria]] Criteria 1.
Thanks - apologies for not finding it myself.
Always use a more free alternative if one is available. Such images can often be used more readily outside the U.S. If you see a fair use image and know of an alternative more free equivalent, please replace it, so the Wikipedia can become as free as possible. Eventually we may have a way to identify images as more restricted than GFDL on the article pages, to make the desire for a more free image more obvious.
So, what is an "equivalent"? How much worse can the free image be before we don't have to consider it "equivalent"? Considering that "worse" can mean lower resolution, lower technical quality, less focused on the concept of hand (eg, a picture of a building when we're discussing its front door), less aesthetically pleasing, diagram vs photo, hand drawn image vs photo, etc etc.
How much value does a photo being "free" really add to any given encyclopaedic article? Is this policy about promoting "free" images not at odds with other policies which are all about producing a high quality encyclopaedia? What happens when the goal to produce a "high quality" encyclopaedia is at odds with the goal to produce a "free" encyclopaedia?
Steve
On 8/1/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
So, what is an "equivalent"? How much worse can the free image be before we don't have to consider it "equivalent"? Considering that "worse" can mean lower resolution, lower technical quality, less focused on the concept of hand (eg, a picture of a building when we're discussing its front door), less aesthetically pleasing, diagram vs photo, hand drawn image vs photo, etc etc.
Out of 10 a fair use image can never rate above two. How you rate them? Well ultimely general gidelines can't really help with that.
On 8/1/06, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
Out of 10 a fair use image can never rate above two. How you rate them? Well ultimely general gidelines can't really help with that.
Don't fall into the trap of thinking that *every* fair image has some free twin that could replace it. In the cases of CD covers or images of Superman or whatever, it's just no the case. To fulfil our mission, we're always going to need fair use images.
Steve
On 8/1/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 8/1/06, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
Out of 10 a fair use image can never rate above two. How you rate them? Well ultimely general gidelines can't really help with that.
Don't fall into the trap of thinking that *every* fair image has some free twin that could replace it. In the cases of CD covers
What do we need CD covers for? in most cases we are commenting on the music rather than the art on the cover
or images of Superman
Wait 56 years
or whatever, it's just no the case. To fulfil our mission, we're always going to need fair use images.
I know this.
On 8/1/06, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
What do we need CD covers for? in most cases we are commenting on the music rather than the art on the cover
Any article about an album without an image of the cover is seriously amiss. It's just as bad as an article about an apple without a photo of one. The cover art is *the* image people associate with the music, rightly or wrongly.
Can you imagine [[Nevermind]] without the naked baby?
Steve
On 8/1/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 8/1/06, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
What do we need CD covers for? in most cases we are commenting on the music rather than the art on the cover
Any article about an album without an image of the cover is seriously amiss. It's just as bad as an article about an apple without a photo of one. The cover art is *the* image people associate with the music, rightly or wrongly.
In some cases. but is it is interesting that if that is the case the lack of a mention of the cover art in some many of our album articles
Can you imagine [[Nevermind]] without the naked baby?
Yes but that article actualy mentions the cover art.
On the other hand:
[[.38 Special (album)]] [[Special Delivery (album)]] [[Rockin' into the Night]] [[Toto (album)]] [[Hydra (album)]] [[Garbage (album)]] [[Version 2.0]] [[At the End of the Day]] [[Artifakts (bc)]] [[Monkey Island (album)]] [[The Morning After (J. Geils album)]]
Etc^very big number do not.
On 8/2/06, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
Yes but that article actualy mentions the cover art.
On the other hand:
[[.38 Special (album)]] [[Special Delivery (album)]] [[Rockin' into the Night]]
<snip>
The image is still crucial to being able to identify the album in other contexts.
Steve
On 8/2/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
The image is still crucial to being able to identify the album in other contexts.
Steve
I'm not sure that is much of an fair use defence and in any case where?
On 8/2/06, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
I'm not sure that is much of an fair use defence and in any case where?
I don't think there is any doubt over the legitimacy of including a low-res scan of an album cover in an article about the album.
Steve
On 8/2/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 8/2/06, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
I'm not sure that is much of an fair use defence and in any case where?
I don't think there is any doubt over the legitimacy of including a low-res scan of an album cover in an article about the album.
Steve
On what basis?
On 8/2/06, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On what basis?
Amongst others the fact that noone's artistic income is in jeopardy. But this is a pretty silly conversation.
Steve
geni wrote:
On 8/2/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 8/2/06, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
I'm not sure that is much of an fair use defence and in any case where?
I don't think there is any doubt over the legitimacy of including a low-res scan of an album cover in an article about the album.
Steve
On what basis?
For educational, criticism and critiquing purposes; we're educating readers about what the album looks like if they want to go to their local music store and buy it :)
On 8/3/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) alphasigmax@gmail.com wrote:
geni wrote:
On 8/2/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 8/2/06, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
I'm not sure that is much of an fair use defence and in any case where?
I don't think there is any doubt over the legitimacy of including a low-res scan of an album cover in an article about the album.
Steve
On what basis?
For educational, criticism and critiquing purposes; we're educating readers about what the album looks like if they want to go to their local music store and buy it :)
I showed that in most cases the album cover art is not mentioned in the text. It is quite posible to buy an album without knowing what it looks like.
On 8/3/06, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
I showed that in most cases the album cover art is not mentioned in the text.
The album cover art is part of the whole package, IMO; it's thus valid to show it as a visual depiction even if it's not explicitly mentioned by itself.
It is quite posible to buy an album without knowing what it looks like.
It is indeed, but it's not easier.
Besides, there's a long history (pre Wikipedia, heck pre internet) of album cover art being usable as fair use when writing about albums.
-Matt
On 8/3/06, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
I showed that in most cases the album cover art is not mentioned in the text. It is quite posible to buy an album without knowing what it looks like.
That's true, and I agree that most of them are really NOT strictly necessary from an informational point of view. However I think things like album covers are one of our safest categories from a legal point of view, both for us and for re-users, since they are not competing with any market and are most likely to be considered transformative.
All of the "media covers" we have are pretty safe in my mind; I wish people would spend more time on the more ambiguous categories of fair use, the ones with real potential for difficulties (i.e. the thousands of unattributed celebrity photographs and things labeled as "publicity photos", half of which are scans from magazines and the like).
FF
On 8/1/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
images of Superman
Wouldn't some of the oldest films have trailers in the public domain?
geni wrote:
On 8/1/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
images of Superman
Wouldn't some of the oldest films have trailers in the public domain?
If the copyrights on the older films were not renewed they would be in the public domain.
Ec
Steve Bennett wrote:
To fulfil our mission, we're always going to need fair use images.
On de:, they don't allow fair use at all; are they then not fulfilling their mission?
I'm not ideologically opposed to fair use, I just think we really need to pinch down on it. If every fair-use image had to run the gauntlet of annual IfD-type polls, with only surly oldtime admins voting :-), the net numbers would probably come out about right.
Stan
On 8/2/06, Stan Shebs shebs@apple.com wrote:
On de:, they don't allow fair use at all; are they then not fulfilling their mission?
In that particular aspect I would say they're fulfilling it less well.
I'm not ideologically opposed to fair use, I just think we really need to pinch down on it. If every fair-use image had to run the gauntlet of annual IfD-type polls, with only surly oldtime admins voting :-), the net numbers would probably come out about right.
Ideologically, I'm basically for using every image we can possibly get away with and then some. Fortunately, my ideology is not running the project.
Steve
On 8/1/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
Don't fall into the trap of thinking that *every* fair image has some free twin that could replace it. In the cases of CD covers or images of Superman or whatever, it's just no the case. To fulfil our mission, we're always going to need fair use images.
Steve
So the German Wikipedia will never be able to fulfill its mission?
-- nyenyec
On 8/10/06, Nyenyec N nyenyec@gmail.com wrote:
So the German Wikipedia will never be able to fulfill its mission?
In terms of completeness of image coverage, there are topics in de.wp that cannot be illustrated.
Whether this means anything to do with 'fulfilmnet of mission' depends on how you define that - which ends up how much you value the 'free' part of 'free encyclopedia', and just as importantly, how 'free' defines for you.
-Matt
On 8/10/06, Nyenyec N nyenyec@gmail.com wrote:
Don't fall into the trap of thinking that *every* fair image has some free twin that could replace it. In the cases of CD covers or images of Superman or whatever, it's just no the case. To fulfil our mission, we're always going to need fair use images.
Steve
So the German Wikipedia will never be able to fulfill its mission?
I think Wikipedia's mission is sufficiently open that it would never be a question of saying "our mission is now fulfilled". I do believe that EN fulfils its mission better than DE when it comes to this issue, yes.
Steve
On 10/08/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
So the German Wikipedia will never be able to fulfill its mission?
I think Wikipedia's mission is sufficiently open that it would never be a question of saying "our mission is now fulfilled". I do believe that EN fulfils its mission better than DE when it comes to this issue, yes.
en: operates as if work is under US law and somewhat under UK law; de: assumes a majority of its contributors will be in Germany, so operates as if work is also under German law. Which may be overly conservative (though I think it's a good idea Commons operates under very conservative rules for maximum international usability), but probably makes sense in that case.
It does detract from what can be depicted in de:, which will reduce the usefulness of the resulting encyclopedia - e.g. my favourite example is that [[Xenu]] on en: would be significantly diminished without the single existing sample of the word "Xenu" in Hubbard's own handwriting - and there's also the moral issue of asserting that our shared culture should morally be usable when talking about it, even with odiously overextended copyright laws to deal with - e.g. Jimbo's kind offer to the National Portrait Gallery to sue and be damned (since which they've been rather quiet). It's all a tricky one.
- d.
On the subject of the technical solutions to bad fair use, http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6880 may be of interest to some. It was born out of discussion at the URL provided there (WikiProject Fair Use).
Ed.
On 8/11/06, Ed Sanders ejsanders@gmail.com wrote:
On the subject of the technical solutions to bad fair use, http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6880 may be of interest to some. It was born out of discussion at the URL provided there (WikiProject Fair Use).
I would be opposed to implementing this feature until we demonstrate that we can make good use of it.
We could make such a list on-wiki and use a bot for enforcement. The software feature would only speed up enforcement. You could start today.. get tagging!
There was some movement about a year ago to require fair use images to name their used pages in their justification claims, but this was opposed by folks advocating boilerplate fair use statements.
Hi,
It seems that I was recently invited by an admin to leave the en:wikipedia project...
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk%3ARequests_for_comm...
...over my apparantly too-conservative approach to unfree content or my understanding of Wikipedia as part of the free culture movement. The comment was strangely phrased, because it ended with "If you're here to do other things than make the best possible free encyclopedia..." while the rest of it was railing against "some la-di-da free culture movement love-in", so I may be misunderstanding (but it is more likely that this is a "free as in beer" usage). In any case, I'm not taking the suggestion all that seriously, but I do wonder what this says about where we are. Is en a project where free culture advocates should expect to be mocked and invited to leave? Would there be any interest in creating a fork of en that uses unfree content only when absolutely necessary and in a way that such content could be easily stripped out for reusers? Is this local to en? Where is people's comfort level with emphatic disagreement over the issue?
I think that there is plenty of room for contributors to wikimedia projects who aren't interested in the potential for reuse of those projects, but I am wondering where en is at if admins are actively dissuading contributors who value it.
Jkelly
On 8/11/06, jkelly@fas.harvard.edu jkelly@fas.harvard.edu wrote:
... Is en a project where free culture advocates should expect to be mocked and invited to leave? Would there be any interest in creating a fork of en that uses unfree content only when absolutely necessary and in a way that such content could be easily stripped out for reusers? Is this local to en? Where is people's comfort level with emphatic disagreement over the issue?
I think that there is plenty of room for contributors to wikimedia projects who aren't interested in the potential for reuse of those projects, but I am wondering where en is at if admins are actively dissuading contributors who value it.
I don't think that en: -- or any Wikimedia project, for that matter -- should be a place where *any* good-faith contributor is "mocked and invited to leave." That the level of discussion here has descended to that -- and, in particular, that some of our admins seem to revel in driving people off the project -- can only be described as a disgrace.
On 8/11/06, jkelly@fas.harvard.edu jkelly@fas.harvard.edu wrote:
... Is en a project where free culture advocates should expect to be mocked and invited to leave? Would there be any interest in creating a fork of en that uses unfree content only when absolutely necessary and in a way that such content could be easily stripped out for reusers? Is this local to en? Where is people's comfort level with emphatic disagreement over the issue?
I think that there is plenty of room for contributors to wikimedia projects who aren't interested in the potential for reuse of those projects, but I am wondering where en is at if admins are actively dissuading contributors who value it.
Way too... conceptual.
Could you please rephrase the entire question only simplified to something based on just the concepts of "deletionism" and "inclusionism?"
:}
-SV
__________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com
On 11/08/06, jkelly@fas.harvard.edu jkelly@fas.harvard.edu wrote:
It seems that I was recently invited by an admin to leave the en:wikipedia project... http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk%3ARequests_for_comm...
Let's read and quote what it actually says there, shall we?
"If you're here to do other things than make the best possible free encyclopedia, then -- to borrow a nauseatingly common theme from the other side's advocates -- the door's right over there."
I think every word of that is the case and needs to be drummed into people's heads, myself.
Note also it's an if-then. Your offence at the statement implies you meet the condition, and hence are here for some other reason. Is that what you meant?
- d.
David,
Let's read and quote what it actually says there, shall we?
"If you're here to do other things than make the best possible free encyclopedia, then -- to borrow a nauseatingly common theme from the other side's advocates -- the door's right over there."
Free as in speech, or free as in beer? Did you read the actual thread?
Jkelly
On 11/08/06, jkelly@fas.harvard.edu jkelly@fas.harvard.edu wrote:
Let's read and quote what it actually says there, shall we? "If you're here to do other things than make the best possible free encyclopedia, then -- to borrow a nauseatingly common theme from the other side's advocates -- the door's right over there."
Free as in speech, or free as in beer? Did you read the actual thread?
Free as in speech. What did you think it meant?
- d.
On 8/11/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 11/08/06, jkelly@fas.harvard.edu jkelly@fas.harvard.edu wrote:
It seems that I was recently invited by an admin to leave the
en:wikipedia
project...
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk%3ARequests_for_comm...
Let's read and quote what it actually says there, shall we?
"If you're here to do other things than make the best possible free encyclopedia, then -- to borrow a nauseatingly common theme from the other side's advocates -- the door's right over there."
I think every word of that is the case and needs to be drummed into people's heads, myself.
Note also it's an if-then. Your offence at the statement implies you meet the condition, and hence are here for some other reason. Is that what you meant?
The sentence before that is the problematic one.
Hero's full comment was: *"We are largely still operating as if most people here are working to give away a free, reusable encyclopedia, as if most editors here think of themselves as part of the open sourcehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source/ free culture movement http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_culture_movement"* We are? Maybe "we" better wake up. *It's supposed to be an encyclopedia*, not some la-di-da "free culture movement" love-in. I'd say that many, many editors think that the free-image-only policy is asinine -- which it is, obviously, *if you want to build a first-rate encyclopedia.* If you're here to do other things than make the best possible free encyclopedia, then -- to borrow a nauseatingly common theme from the other side's advocates -- the door's right over there. Herostratushttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Herostratus06:02, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
I would love to be able to use random professional copyrighted images for WP articles; there are plenty of great images out there which we won't get permission to use.
The impact on Wikipedia's redistributability - hence the "is this project still free or not?" question - is significant if we change the image policy much.
Is this policy subject to evolving consensus (and legal changes, etc?). Sure. Is it appropriate to ask people to leave just because they happen to agree with current consensus, that the legal implications of non-free images are much worse than what using them would bring to WP? No.
Copyright law sometimes causes freely redistributable things all sorts of pain and suffering. If you want to work to change the law, feel free, either through lobbying or court cases or whatnot. Taking a too-free interpretation of existing copyright law right now, though, could easily get Wikipedia in a world of hurt. There have been copyright cases with damages and legal fees which exceed the net value of WMF.
On 11/08/06, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
Copyright law sometimes causes freely redistributable things all sorts of pain and suffering. If you want to work to change the law, feel free, either through lobbying or court cases or whatnot. Taking a too-free interpretation of existing copyright law right now, though, could easily get Wikipedia in a world of hurt. There have been copyright cases with damages and legal fees which exceed the net value of WMF.
OTOH, that doesn't mean shy away from specious examples like the National Portrait Gallery's specious legal threats.
- d.
On 8/11/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 11/08/06, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
Copyright law sometimes causes freely redistributable things all sorts
of
pain and suffering. If you want to work to change the law, feel free, either through lobbying or court cases or whatnot. Taking a too-free interpretation of existing copyright law right now, though, could easily
get
Wikipedia in a world of hurt. There have been copyright cases with
damages
and legal fees which exceed the net value of WMF.
OTOH, that doesn't mean shy away from specious examples like the National Portrait Gallery's specious legal threats.
No, it would be silly to assume that any copyright violation claim is inherently legally valid or morally valid. People make legally questionable legal threats all the time.
But that doesn't invalidate the general reasons why current policy is what it is.
On 8/11/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Let's read and quote what it actually says there, shall we?
"If you're here to do other things than make the best possible free encyclopedia, then -- to borrow a nauseatingly common theme from the other side's advocates -- the door's right over there."
I think every word of that is the case and needs to be drummed into people's heads, myself.
[snip]
Tisk tisk David, have you forgotten that context counts.
In the cited thread the argument is made that we can not accept a proliferation of unlicensed content merely because by violating copyright we can obtain a temporary increase in article quality.
The quoted diff is making the counter argument that being a high quality encyclopedia is all that counts and that being perpetually free for all applications isn't a goal of the project.
If there is anything highlighted here that needs to be drummed into anyone's head it is that the importance of free content in our mission is no less than the importance of being a quality encyclopedia.
I hope that this is just a case of you failing to read before running your mouth.
On 11/08/06, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
Tisk tisk David, have you forgotten that context counts. I hope that this is just a case of you failing to read before running your mouth.
Whoops, looks like it was. My apologies to jkelly. I was wr- wr- that word.
- d.
David,
Whoops, looks like it was. My apologies to jkelly. I was wr- wr- that word.
There's no need to apologise; I'm a lot less interested in any potential slight than I am in the larger question of where en is at in terms of being "free as in speech". It seemed to me that you might be agreeing that it would make sense to fork en for those people who really value the "giving away freely" part of the project.
I'll admit that I do spend a lot of time replacing unfree content with free content, so there is some degree of investment for me, at least in terms of how much that might be valued.
Jkelly
On 8/11/06, jkelly@fas.harvard.edu jkelly@fas.harvard.edu wrote:
...over my apparantly too-conservative approach to unfree content or my understanding of Wikipedia as part of the free culture movement. The comment was strangely phrased, because it ended with "If you're here to do other things than make the best possible free encyclopedia..." while the rest of it was railing against "some la-di-da free culture movement love-in", so I may be
The way I see this is, if your actions have an overall positive impact on our mission of producing a high quality free encyclopaedia, then your motivations aren't really relevant to anyone. You can be here as part of a free culture movement, or you can be here as part of an insidious plan to educate the world on the joys of stamp collecting, but as long as your edits advance *our* goals, then who cares?
Also, some people are twats.
Steve
--- Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
Also, some people are twats.
I think the proper term is "twits," but I often use the mispelled version myself.
:)
-SV
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On 8/11/06, stevertigo vertigosteve@yahoo.com wrote:
--- Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
Also, some people are twats.
I think the proper term is "twits," but I often use the mispelled version myself.
Quoting you-know-who, "Twat is a vulgar term for the human vagina, which can also be used as a derogatory epithet."
Steve
--- Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
Quoting you-know-who, "Twat is a vulgar term for the human vagina, which can also be used as a derogatory epithet."
Aye, but amended to that should be "...toward women."
"The term carries a connotation of or allusion to a ''difference'' between men and women with regard to their effective "twittiness" (patent pending), based on their particular anatomies and the understood effects thereof." (Quoth myself.)
-SV
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On 8/11/06, stevertigo vertigosteve@yahoo.com wrote:
--- Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
Quoting you-know-who, "Twat is a vulgar term for the human vagina, which can also be used as a derogatory epithet."
Aye, but amended to that should be "...toward women."
Not in my experience; it is used as a degoratory epithet towards both genders. It is probably used /more/ towards men, in fact; perhaps because the tone of it is percieved as different directed towards a woman, who would possess the body part in question. Whether it is more offensive towards a man or towards a woman is beyond my giving-a-damn to determine; I'd imagine, like many similar insults, the difference is in nature rather than degree.
(returning to your regularly scheduled programming ...)
-Matt
On 8/11/06, jkelly@fas.harvard.edu jkelly@fas.harvard.edu wrote:
I think that there is plenty of room for contributors to wikimedia projects who aren't interested in the potential for reuse of those projects, but I am wondering where en is at if admins are actively dissuading contributors who value it.
Incidentally, why has no one pointed out that what "admins" think is irrelevant. They have no particular standing within the project, and no more say than anyone else on *any* issue. Admins are employed to take care of obvious vandals and various other boring tasks. They don't decide who stays and who goes.
Steve
G'day Steve,
On 8/11/06, jkelly@fas.harvard.edu jkelly@fas.harvard.edu wrote:
I think that there is plenty of room for contributors to wikimedia projects who aren't interested in the potential for reuse of those projects, but I am wondering where en is at if admins are actively dissuading contributors who value it.
Incidentally, why has no one pointed out that what "admins" think is irrelevant. They have no particular standing within the project, and no more say than anyone else on *any* issue. Admins are employed to take care of obvious vandals and various other boring tasks. They don't decide who stays and who goes.
Whether we like it or not, the views expressed by an identified admin carry more weight than those of, say, Joe Bloggs, who's merely written a few hundred articles, taken thousands of beautiful photographs, taken dozens of pages from Cleanup to FA status, and so on, but has not otherwise contributed meaningfully to the project as yet (what a parasite!).
We can repeat "adminship is no big deal" as often as we want, and hopefully some non-admins will start to believe it. Regardless, what an admin says *is* often noticed, and so admins have a responsibility to behave themselves. Admins who say stupid things should not be noticed more than users who say stupid things; however, given that they *are*, our collection of admins therefore damn well ought to *stop* saying stupid things.
(I note the admin in question was Herostratus, whose recent passing RfA I was very cheered to see. It's always the one you least expect, eh?)
On 8/12/06, Mark Gallagher m.g.gallagher@student.canberra.edu.au wrote:
Whether we like it or not, the views expressed by an identified admin carry more weight than those of, say, Joe Bloggs, who's merely written a few hundred articles, taken thousands of beautiful photographs, taken dozens of pages from Cleanup to FA status, and so on, but has not otherwise contributed meaningfully to the project as yet (what a parasite!).
In practice, sure. But if an admin tells you that you should think about moving on, it actually carries no more weight than if a newbie said that.
At some stage I'll probably apply for adminship and I will find it hard to avoid putting "because it's a free ride to respect" or something equally impolite in my reasons for applying.
Steve
G'day Steve,
On 8/12/06, Mark Gallagher m.g.gallagher@student.canberra.edu.au wrote:
Whether we like it or not, the views expressed by an identified admin carry more weight than those of, say, Joe Bloggs, who's merely written a few hundred articles, taken thousands of beautiful photographs, taken dozens of pages from Cleanup to FA status, and so on, but has not otherwise contributed meaningfully to the project as yet (what a parasite!).
In practice, sure. But if an admin tells you that you should think about moving on, it actually carries no more weight than if a newbie said that.
My point is that, because *in practice* it *does* carry more weight, admins should not be saying that sort of thing.
At some stage I'll probably apply for adminship and I will find it hard to avoid putting "because it's a free ride to respect" or something equally impolite in my reasons for applying.
If it helps, I don't think I'm any more respected as an admin than I was without the shiny buttons. Read into that what you will ...
On 8/11/06, jkelly@fas.harvard.edu jkelly@fas.harvard.edu wrote:
I think that there is plenty of room for contributors to wikimedia projects who aren't interested in the potential for reuse of those projects, but I am wondering where en is at if admins are actively dissuading contributors who value it.
Jkelly
At a place which is somewhat better than where it used to be. I've been blocked more than once for repeatedly removing obviously non-free images from encyclopedia articles and from the main page. My blocks of course weren't explicitly over what I did but how I did it, similarly to your RFC. But the copyright page used to say that "Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify the text of all Wikipedia materials under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License", and there were quite a few admins who claimed this meant that images need not be under any license at all, so long as it was legal for Wikipedia to use the image. I guess I was acting with far too little patience, as many of Wikipedia's policies over non-free images have gotten a lot better on these points.
Anyway, there are some admins that still don't understand what it means to be a free encyclopedia. But most of them now get it, and even accept it. That said, patience is still required when creating new policies, unless you don't mind getting involved with a number of heated disputes, and getting asked to leave the project.
Anthony
jkelly@fas.harvard.edu wrote:
Hi,
It seems that I was recently invited by an admin to leave the en:wikipedia project...
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk%3ARequests_for_comm...
...over my apparantly too-conservative approach to unfree content or my understanding of Wikipedia as part of the free culture movement. The comment was strangely phrased, because it ended with "If you're here to do other things than make the best possible free encyclopedia..." while the rest of it was railing against "some la-di-da free culture movement love-in", so I may be misunderstanding (but it is more likely that this is a "free as in beer" usage). In any case, I'm not taking the suggestion all that seriously, but I do wonder what this says about where we are.
To me it says that en: has gotten big. I think the old assumption was that the definition of admin as "trustworthy editor" really meant that admins would naturally tend to be in agreement about philosophy and principles. Nowadays there are whole groups of admins that are unaware of each other's existence, and I think it's possible to get voted in on adminship by subgroups of editors, without ever absorbing much of the general culture.
Is en a project where free culture advocates should expect to be mocked and invited to leave? Would there be any interest in creating a fork of en that uses unfree content only when absolutely necessary and in a way that such content could be easily stripped out for reusers? Is this local to en? Where is people's comfort level with emphatic disagreement over the issue?
I think this is another example of the leadership vacuum that we discussed earlier, and shows why it is not a trivial issue. We have no effective process for dealing with a group of fifty admins who collectively decide to take WP in a different direction; while I don't see rebel groups of that size yet, the responses to Kelly's RFC suggest that some may be in the process of forming.
Stan
On 8/14/06, Stan Shebs shebs@apple.com wrote:
I think this is another example of the leadership vacuum that we discussed earlier, and shows why it is not a trivial issue. We have no effective process for dealing with a group of fifty admins who collectively decide to take WP in a different direction;
We do. People keep trying to neutralise it but the comunity is a pain to go against.
On 8/14/06, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
We do. People keep trying to neutralise it but the comunity is a pain to go against.
Exactly - while a group of 50 admins could get away with quite a lot in terms of rewriting policy, say, it would be hard to impose it on the community, woudln't it?
-Matt
G'day Matt,
On 8/14/06, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
We do. People keep trying to neutralise it but the comunity is a pain to go against.
Exactly - while a group of 50 admins could get away with quite a lot in terms of rewriting policy, say, it would be hard to impose it on the community, woudln't it?
Not necessarily. If you aim right, you can get the community to screw *itself*. We already see it on a smaller (and less severe, since there are very few admins involved[0]) scale when it comes to things like:
* Speedy deletion (it's vanity! You must speedy it!) * Image copyright (if you tag it as "fair use" it can't be deleted!) * Edit warring (Ha ha, you reverted four times but I can stop at three and you'll be blocked!)
Let's say we have four users: A, B, C, and D. User A makes some stupid shit up[1]. User B hears him, and adopts it, thinking it's policy. User C does something different, and is attacked by User B for contravening policy. User D, an admin, then comes along and does the Right Thing, according to policy, common sense, God, and apple pie, and gets abused by B and C. This can happen over a stretch of a year or so, in which time B and C have had time to spread the Bad Word to E, F, G, and H. We're at the stage, now, where B can run for adminship --- *on his policy knowledge* --- and pass!
Witness, for example, the "Administrator Discretion Zone". I've seen two admins recently (within a month or two) close an AfD along the lines of "the tally is only 60%, so that falls under my discretion, and I vote delete". This is wrong for more reasons than I could count (if I was of a mind to count, and when it comes to AfD I don't do *any* counting), but I've got a smart-arsed chap on DRV who thinks he's a policy wonk telling me that referring to the ADZ is perfectly justified and I'm an ignoramus for claiming otherwise. Now, I've been very busy in the last few weeks and my egg-sucking abilities may not be up to their usual standards, but I submit that the mere fact that someone can honestly believe this crap *and* be one hell of a smug bastard in the meantime shows that people can spread misinformation about policy quite easily just be getting the wrong idea in their heads and having other editors copy them.
Now, imagine what fifty people with admin status and powers could do if they really wanted to fuck things up. They wouldn't need to head out there and re-write policy by fiat or anything like that. They'd just need to convince enough of us that 2 + 2 = 5, and we'd fuck *ourselves* up. Hint: CVU are a powerful tool for anyone attempting this[2].
[0] Someone who spreads misinformation about the blocking policy is not as big a problem as someone who spreads misinformation about the blocking policy *and* uses their blocking powers to back that up.
[1] Bad faith isn't necessarily the cause of our problems. Chinese Whispers is far more common; however, that requires more than four users :-)
[2] Kids! Don't try this at home!
On 8/15/06, Mark Gallagher m.g.gallagher@student.canberra.edu.au wrote:
- Speedy deletion (it's vanity! You must speedy it!)
CSD A7
- Image copyright (if you tag it as "fair use" it can't be deleted!)
Fortunetly there is a loophole in the current set up with no one appears to have found a way to close.
Steve Bennett wrote:
How much value does a photo being "free" really add to any given encyclopaedic article? Is this policy about promoting "free" images not at odds with other policies which are all about producing a high quality encyclopaedia? What happens when the goal to produce a "high quality" encyclopaedia is at odds with the goal to produce a "free" encyclopaedia?
"High quality" but not "free" could mean lifting current EB articles, fixing the mistakes, and putting them on the site. After all, if you're just extracting an article here and there, and our site is educational, that's fair use, right? :-)
Every nonfree image cuts into our status as a free resource; it also affects downstream and commercial reusers of content, who likely can't afford to track down the copyright holder of every single nonfree image and license them, so they just filter them out en masse. So "nonfree" ends up becoming "no picture at all".
Stan
On 8/1/06, Stan Shebs shebs@apple.com wrote:
Every nonfree image cuts into our status as a free resource; it also
Can you explain that a bit more? I don't know what it means to be a "free resource" or why exactly we want to be that. What makes one more or less "free"? Is an image resource with 10,000 free images and 1000 fair use less free than one with 9,000 free and 0 fair use?
affects downstream and commercial reusers of content, who likely can't afford to track down the copyright holder of every single nonfree image and license them, so they just filter them out en masse. So "nonfree" ends up becoming "no picture at all".
That sounds like a technical problem. Sounds like we need a way to gracefully degrade from non-free to free. Maybe a template that can specify which image a content reuser should fall back on if they don't want to use non-free images.
Steve
Steve Bennett wrote:
On 8/1/06, Stan Shebs shebs@apple.com wrote:
Every nonfree image cuts into our status as a free resource; it also
Can you explain that a bit more? I don't know what it means to be a "free resource" or why exactly we want to be that.
Well, the free part means that everybody can use it without paying. A while back I had a USDA guy calling me up about one of my date palm photos, because apparently there aren't that many photos on the net showing the fruits while on the tree, and I was happy that he wanted to use mine rather than paying for commercial stock with my tax dollars.
What makes one more or less "free"? Is an image resource with 10,000 free images and 1000 fair use less free than one with 9,000 free and 0 fair use?
I would say so, because the 1000 mean that I can't freely use the whole body of work, I have to pay attention to which is which.
affects downstream and commercial reusers of content, who likely can't afford to track down the copyright holder of every single nonfree image and license them, so they just filter them out en masse. So "nonfree" ends up becoming "no picture at all".
That sounds like a technical problem. Sounds like we need a way to gracefully degrade from non-free to free. Maybe a template that can specify which image a content reuser should fall back on if they don't want to use non-free images.
But why go to that much trouble though? We're not trying to enable coffeetable art books after all. Sure it would be nice if we had the professional's pretty blue sky over the Bulgarian town, but the purpose of showing the town is still served by the amateur pic with the glary white haze.
Stan
On 8/2/06, Stan Shebs shebs@apple.com wrote:
But why go to that much trouble though? We're not trying to enable coffeetable art books after all. Sure it would be nice if we had the professional's pretty blue sky over the Bulgarian town, but the purpose of showing the town is still served by the amateur pic with the glary white haze.
That's very much a question of opinion. One of the things I like about [[WP:FPC]] is seeing all the really high quality images that do show up when we put some effort into identifying and recognising talent. For me, just as we go for high quality text, so should we be going for high quality images to accompany it.
Check out this current nominee! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Empis_livida_%28aka%29.jpg
Steve
On 8/1/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 8/1/06, Garion96 garion96@gmail.com wrote:
Copied from the policy [[Wikipedia:Fair use criteria]] Criteria 1.
Thanks - apologies for not finding it myself.
NP, considering the amount of guidelines and policies, it's easy to miss something. :)
Always use a more free alternative if one is available.
So, what is an "equivalent"? How much worse can the free image be before we don't have to consider it "equivalent"? Considering that "worse" can mean lower resolution, lower technical quality, less focused on the concept of hand (eg, a picture of a building when we're discussing its front door), less aesthetically pleasing, diagram vs photo, hand drawn image vs photo, etc etc.
I don't think there are any criteria on that. I know for instance that sometimes a fair use image of a living person is replaced by a 'free' mugshot (although I believe there are doubts if those are really 'free') but I don't really like that. I prefer no image in those cases. See the Mel Gibson article in that regard.
How much value does a photo being "free" really add to any given encyclopaedic article? Is this policy about promoting "free" images not at odds with other policies which are all about producing a high quality encyclopaedia? What happens when the goal to produce a "high quality" encyclopaedia is at odds with the goal to produce a "free" encyclopaedia?
I just see pictures as extra, they are nice and really help the encyclopedia. But the text for me is what makes a high quality encyclopedia, not the images.
I do like it that we can make use of fair use though. But I think it should be used more like Jimbo recently mentioned here http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk%3APublicity_photos&...
Garion96
On 8/2/06, Garion96 garion96@gmail.com wrote:
I just see pictures as extra, they are nice and really help the encyclopedia. But the text for me is what makes a high quality encyclopedia, not the images.
Well, each to his own, I'm a big fan of good images, and kind of see the text as the necessary amount of padding to avoid people removing the images on the basis of there being too many :) Seriously, though, it depends on the subject. I would much rather see images of mountains, castles, rivers or musical instruments than read about them. On the other hand, images of people, trains, computers, wars etc aren't that interesting.
I do like it that we can make use of fair use though. But I think it should be used more like Jimbo recently mentioned here http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk%3APublicity_photos&...
The man speaks much sense there. I hadn't thought of using our bargaining power to obtain new free images.
Though I would disagree that album art is the "only sensible illustration" of an album - other possible images include the artist during recording or writing, places or events that inspired it, photos of the recording studio (think Abbey Road), the producer, or even concerts that made use of the album material...
Steve
On 8/1/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
How much value does a photo being "free" really add to any given encyclopaedic article? Is this policy about promoting "free" images not at odds with other policies which are all about producing a high quality encyclopaedia? What happens when the goal to produce a "high quality" encyclopaedia is at odds with the goal to produce a "free" encyclopaedia?
The value is project-wide, not necessarily on an article-by-article basis. And I think Jimbo would say that a high quality encyclopedia is never at odds with producing a free one. Wikipedia could still be high quality even if it lacked fair use images. Most encyclopedias do *not* have an image for every article and do not feel the need to, much less images of lesser known celebrities and video games.
Also, I think the more free and good looking images Wikipedia has, the more impressive and useful it is. Wikipedia is currently the only site I know of on the 'net where you can get high-quality vector images illustrating a wide-variety of things (parts of cars, household items, hydrogen bombs).
Ugly free images can also inspire better free images. I have many times replaced well-intentioned but amateurish free images with re-done, more professional looking free versions. If everything is a slick un-free image, though, the obviousness of what should be replaced goes down a bit.
FF
On 03/08/06, Fastfission fastfission@gmail.com wrote:
The value is project-wide, not necessarily on an article-by-article basis. And I think Jimbo would say that a high quality encyclopedia is never at odds with producing a free one. Wikipedia could still be high quality even if it lacked fair use images. Most encyclopedias do *not* have an image for every article and do not feel the need to, much less images of lesser known celebrities and video games.
I would consider these two, and other similar types of articles (such as on films and television programs), to be the only articles which truly warrant Fair Use images. I think there is use in providing an image with close to every article - it displays information in a different form and can be highly enlightening to a user. Anything which is accessible to the public should have free images (objects, places and people).
The [[David Bowie]] article gets around the lack of free use photographs by using a free use drawing. It looks like it could be a drawing of a photograph and is certainly recognisable as David Bowie. When does a drawing start violating copyright? Drawings are quite subjective, is there much value in them?
On 8/3/06, Oldak Quill oldakquill@gmail.com wrote:
The [[David Bowie]] article gets around the lack of free use photographs by using a free use drawing. It looks like it could be a drawing of a photograph and is certainly recognisable as David Bowie. When does a drawing start violating copyright? Drawings are quite subjective, is there much value in them?
Well, that's a very different question than the one we've been throwing around here. It depends on the photograph, and it depends on the drawing, and in the end it the final work itself is invoking a fair use concern in one capacity or another since it is definitely derivative.
FF
On 8/3/06, Fastfission fastfission@gmail.com wrote:
The value is project-wide, not necessarily on an article-by-article basis. And I think Jimbo would say that a high quality encyclopedia is never at odds with producing a free one. Wikipedia could still be high
Eh? Britannica has done pretty well at producing a high quality encyclopaedia, but they haven't gotten off the ground in the free stakes.
quality even if it lacked fair use images. Most encyclopedias do *not*
It would be, shall we say, "less high quality".
have an image for every article and do not feel the need to, much less images of lesser known celebrities and video games.
Wikipedia is not most encyclopaedias, it's a hell of a lot better. It's much broader, and significantly deeper in many areas. Most encyclopaedias don't have a photo for every article because they don't have room to publish them, not because they don't feel they would be of value.
Also, I think the more free and good looking images Wikipedia has, the more impressive and useful it is. Wikipedia is currently the only site I know of on the 'net where you can get high-quality vector images illustrating a wide-variety of things (parts of cars, household items, hydrogen bombs).
Yes, it's a pity that we have to do all our diagrams from scratch, there are thousands of articles that need some.
Ugly free images can also inspire better free images. I have many times replaced well-intentioned but amateurish free images with re-done, more professional looking free versions. If everything is a slick un-free image, though, the obviousness of what should be replaced goes down a bit.
I would have no qualms against putting a red border around non free images.
Steve
On 8/3/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 8/3/06, Fastfission fastfission@gmail.com wrote:
The value is project-wide, not necessarily on an article-by-article basis. And I think Jimbo would say that a high quality encyclopedia is never at odds with producing a free one. Wikipedia could still be high
Eh? Britannica has done pretty well at producing a high quality encyclopaedia, but they haven't gotten off the ground in the free stakes.
I'll Eh? right back at you. Just because EB can produce quality and NOT be free does not at all mean that quality and being free are incompatible.
In any case, going back and forth over the question of whether Wikipedia would be high quality without fair use images seems fairly silly to me since the designation is entirely subjective. I think your position is a little silly but you're allowed to say the same about mine. I think you're putting short-term aesthetics ahead of legal and long-term sensibilities.
Yes, it's a pity that we have to do all our diagrams from scratch, there are thousands of articles that need some.
So put in a diagram request. There are people who are happy to make diagrams for articles. Filling diagram requests is MUCH easier than photography because you can do it from anywhere and with free software.
FF
On 8/4/06, Fastfission fastfission@gmail.com wrote:
On 8/3/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 8/3/06, Fastfission fastfission@gmail.com wrote:
The value is project-wide, not necessarily on an article-by-article basis. And I think Jimbo would say that a high quality encyclopedia is never at odds with producing a free one. Wikipedia could still be high
Eh? Britannica has done pretty well at producing a high quality encyclopaedia, but they haven't gotten off the ground in the free stakes.
I'll Eh? right back at you. Just because EB can produce quality and NOT be free does not at all mean that quality and being free are incompatible.
Ok, we're probably understanding the phrase "at odds with" differently. In any case, I think we agree - an encyclopaedia can be high quality without being free, free without being high quality, or can be both. And there are decisions that can be taken which are effectively trade offs - the quality of EB would probably suffer greatly if it suddenly converted to a wiki with all paid staff sacked. On the other hand, Wikipedia is much higher quality than a number of other "closed source" encyclopaedias.
In any case, going back and forth over the question of whether Wikipedia would be high quality without fair use images seems fairly silly to me since the designation is entirely subjective. I think your position is a little silly but you're allowed to say the same about mine. I think you're putting short-term aesthetics ahead of legal and long-term sensibilities.
Yep. I don't believe a great deal in the future - or maybe I'm impatient and short-sighted. My attitude towards editing Wikipedia (and wikis in general) is "what can I do to make this page better for the next user than it was five minutes ago, and how can I encourage that next user to make it even better for the user after him". Sometimes a short term dip in "quality" has to be taken for the long term - removing useful but unverifiable and POV information, for instance. I don't know that I'm really advocating taking legal risks for short term gains though.
Yes, it's a pity that we have to do all our diagrams from scratch, there are thousands of articles that need some.
So put in a diagram request. There are people who are happy to make diagrams for articles. Filling diagram requests is MUCH easier than photography because you can do it from anywhere and with free software.
You're right, I will.
Steve
On 8/1/06, jkelly@fas.harvard.edu jkelly@fas.harvard.edu wrote:
Another technical solution might be to impose terrible resolution on unfree images, which itself could be switched off (perhaps by bureaucrats) when there is a real need to (as, for instance, with the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons). If the default was for unfree content to be less aesthetically appealing than freely-licensed content, we wouldn't have editors constantly replacing freely-licensed images with unfreely-licensed ones.
We can always resize fair use images to make them smaller. Most images are displayed in articles as thmbnails no larger than 300px in width (although images with landscape orientation are sometimes larger than this), and I think that it would be reasonable to downsize most images to this resolution or smaller.
Certainly anything which is in the same proportions as a standard photo print or a computer display would not need to be any larger than 300px.
I doubt there would be any copyright implications with adjusting images like this, if all we do is make them smaller - we're simply using less of the copyrighted work. It would be as if we scanned or copied the source at a lower resolution in the first place. Similarly cropping images would be a modification with no copyright implications. It would be important not to make any other modifications though.
On 21/07/06, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
On 7/21/06, Mark Wagner carnildo@gmail.com wrote:
By making image uploading a privilege to be earned rather than a right conferred by registering an account, we can relax the policy and deal with uploaders individually, rather than automated notification of problems and nearly-automated deletion of problematic images.
We have already stripped new users and anons of far too many rights. We have already gone through the creation of semi-protection, the prevention of page creation, and now we have a suggestion that we prevent them uploading! It is an utter disgrace that we still refer to ourselves as an encyclopedia that "anyone can edit".
It is clear that we have completely lost sight of the original aims of Wikipedia.
On 7/21/06, Oldak Quill oldakquill@gmail.com wrote:
On 21/07/06, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
On 7/21/06, Mark Wagner carnildo@gmail.com wrote:
By making image uploading a privilege to be earned rather than a right conferred by registering an account, we can relax the policy and deal with uploaders individually, rather than automated notification of problems and nearly-automated deletion of problematic images.
We have already stripped new users and anons of far too many rights. We have already gone through the creation of semi-protection, the prevention of page creation, and now we have a suggestion that we prevent them uploading! It is an utter disgrace that we still refer to ourselves as an encyclopedia that "anyone can edit".
It is clear that we have completely lost sight of the original aims of Wikipedia.
I agree. We've completely lost sight of the original aims of Wikipedia.
Originally, Wikipedia was supposed to be free content and be an encyclopedia. We're still reasonably close to being an encyclopedia, but the idea of "free content" has been lost in the flood of hundreds of thousands of non-free images. Most users wouldn't know a free license if it bit them in the ass, and the only reason we've got a million GFDL-licensed articles is because of a snippet of text nobody ever bothers to read. I doubt so much as one editor in a hundred actively wants their contributions to be freely licensed -- the other 99 just want their work to be on Wikipedia.
On 7/21/06, Mark Wagner carnildo@gmail.com wrote:
I agree. We've completely lost sight of the original aims of Wikipedia.
Originally, Wikipedia was supposed to be free content and be an encyclopedia. We're still reasonably close to being an encyclopedia, but the idea of "free content" has been lost in the flood of hundreds of thousands of non-free images. Most users wouldn't know a free license if it bit them in the ass, and the only reason we've got a million GFDL-licensed articles is because of a snippet of text nobody ever bothers to read. I doubt so much as one editor in a hundred actively wants their contributions to be freely licensed -- the other 99 just want their work to be on Wikipedia.
If I wanted my images to be freely licensed I would not be uploading them under the GFDL.
Oldak Quill wrote:
We have already stripped new users and anons of far too many rights. We have already gone through the creation of semi-protection, the prevention of page creation, and now we have a suggestion that we prevent them uploading! It is an utter disgrace that we still refer to ourselves as an encyclopedia that "anyone can edit".
But notice it says "edit", not "upload to".
:-)
If you have a suggestion that doesn't involve large numbers of nonexistent volunteers working all hours to keep WP out of legal peril, feel free to enlighten us.
Stan
On 7/21/06, Stan Shebs shebs@apple.com wrote:
If you have a suggestion that doesn't involve large numbers of nonexistent volunteers working all hours to keep WP out of legal peril, feel free to enlighten us.
Here's one: when people send in a DMCA takedown notice, remove the material, notify the uploader that her materials have been removed (via their talk page and email if the address is known), and provide them with an opportunity to send a written notice to the service provider stating that the material has been wrongly removed. If the uploader provides a proper "counter-notice" claiming that the material does not infringe copyrights, then promptly notify the claiming party of the individual's objection. However, only restore the image if there is also a consensus that the image is "free enough" within the project's guidelines.
Anthony
On 7/21/06, Anthony wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
On 7/21/06, Stan Shebs shebs@apple.com wrote:
If you have a suggestion that doesn't involve large numbers of nonexistent volunteers working all hours to keep WP out of legal peril, feel free to enlighten us.
Here's one: when people send in a DMCA takedown notice, remove the material, notify the uploader that her materials have been removed (via their talk page and email if the address is known), and provide them with an opportunity to send a written notice to the service provider stating that the material has been wrongly removed. If the uploader provides a proper "counter-notice" claiming that the material does not infringe copyrights, then promptly notify the claiming party of the individual's objection. However, only restore the image if there is also a consensus that the image is "free enough" within the project's guidelines.
Or in other words, stick our heads in the ground and pray that everyone opens fire with a takedown notice rather than a lawsuit. Even if the law protects Wikipedia from liability when a user infringes copyright, that still needs to be proven in front of a judge, and even an immediate dismissal requires thousands of dollars in lawyers' fees.
On 7/21/06, Mark Wagner carnildo@gmail.com wrote:
On 7/21/06, Anthony wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
On 7/21/06, Stan Shebs shebs@apple.com wrote:
If you have a suggestion that doesn't involve large numbers of nonexistent volunteers working all hours to keep WP out of legal peril, feel free to enlighten us.
Here's one: when people send in a DMCA takedown notice, remove the material, notify the uploader that her materials have been removed (via their talk page and email if the address is known), and provide them with an opportunity to send a written notice to the service provider stating that the material has been wrongly removed. If the uploader provides a proper "counter-notice" claiming that the material does not infringe copyrights, then promptly notify the claiming party of the individual's objection. However, only restore the image if there is also a consensus that the image is "free enough" within the project's guidelines.
Or in other words, stick our heads in the ground and pray that everyone opens fire with a takedown notice rather than a lawsuit. Even if the law protects Wikipedia from liability when a user infringes copyright, that still needs to be proven in front of a judge, and even an immediate dismissal requires thousands of dollars in lawyers' fees.
The question was how to "keep WP out of legal peril". Obviously creating a good encyclopedia involves more than just this.
Anthony
Mark Wagner wrote:
On 7/21/06, Anthony wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
On 7/21/06, Stan Shebs shebs@apple.com wrote:
If you have a suggestion that doesn't involve large numbers of nonexistent volunteers working all hours to keep WP out of legal peril, feel free to enlighten us.
Here's one: when people send in a DMCA takedown notice, remove the material, notify the uploader that her materials have been removed (via their talk page and email if the address is known), and provide them with an opportunity to send a written notice to the service provider stating that the material has been wrongly removed. If the uploader provides a proper "counter-notice" claiming that the material does not infringe copyrights, then promptly notify the claiming party of the individual's objection. However, only restore the image if there is also a consensus that the image is "free enough" within the project's guidelines.
Or in other words, stick our heads in the ground and pray that everyone opens fire with a takedown notice rather than a lawsuit. Even if the law protects Wikipedia from liability when a user infringes copyright, that still needs to be proven in front of a judge, and even an immediate dismissal requires thousands of dollars in lawyers' fees.
Defeatism? or copyright paranoia? Try being realistic. It's also going to cost the plaintiff to mount the suit, and he has the burden to prove that there was an infringement. It will probably cost the plaintiff more to prosecute the suit than for any of us to defend; a sane lawyer will probably try to talk him out of it unless there really is a lot involved. There are still nutcases who will go ahead, but their knoledge of copyright law is matched by their knowledge of legal procedure. I am not afraid of lawsuits.
Ec
On 7/21/06, Anthony wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
Here's one: when people send in a DMCA takedown notice, remove the material, notify the uploader that her materials have been removed (via their talk page and email if the address is known), and provide them with an opportunity to send a written notice to the service provider stating that the material has been wrongly removed.
[snip]
Making this our practice for handling copyright would put us in a weak position in several respects.
1) It is ethically questionable. When we distribute someone's commercial work tagged as free content, we risk seriously letting the genie out of the bottle. It would do us no good to gain a napster-like reputation. 2) It creates panic-intensive situations.... When a violation is found it's likely that there will be a lot of them creating a lot more work to quickly clean up. 3) If we do enough of it, it wouldn't be hard to convince a judge that our behavior is negligent (we already have a lot of egregious infractions and we're trying.. I can only imagine what we'd have if we didn't try) and get a lovely injunction issued that required us to remove all images that we can't prove are free. :(
But most importantly: 4) Wikipedia is intended to be and advertised to be Free Content. By only removing copyright violations that people have complained about we would be choosing to fail at this goal... and in doing so we would make the fruits of our labor less useful to the world.
In short, while being a nice legal fall-back, the safe harbor terms are not anything we want to rely on in terms of our copyright policy.
Gregory Maxwell wrote:
On 7/21/06, Anthony wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
Here's one: when people send in a DMCA takedown notice, remove the material, notify the uploader that her materials have been removed (via their talk page and email if the address is known), and provide them with an opportunity to send a written notice to the service provider stating that the material has been wrongly removed.
[snip]
Making this our practice for handling copyright would put us in a weak position in several respects.
- It is ethically questionable. When we distribute someone's
commercial work tagged as free content, we risk seriously letting the genie out of the bottle. It would do us no good to gain a napster-like reputation.
What makes it unethical? Is it any more ethical to deprive people of due process if they can make a reasonable legal case. This is not a matter of agreeing to every stupid argument that comes along. This has nothing to do with genies or Napster.
- It creates panic-intensive situations.... When a violation is found
it's likely that there will be a lot of them creating a lot more work to quickly clean up.
If the copyright paranoiacs want to put themselves into a panic, why should the rest of us fall into line with them. Each case needs to be judged on its own merits.
- If we do enough of it, it wouldn't be hard to convince a judge that
our behavior is negligent (we already have a lot of egregious infractions and we're trying.. I can only imagine what we'd have if we didn't try) and get a lovely injunction issued that required us to remove all images that we can't prove are free. :(
Each incident is separate, and other instances would be inadmissible as evidence to prove that a specific incident is an infringement. This position is pure speculation.
But most importantly: 4) Wikipedia is intended to be and advertised to be Free Content. By only removing copyright violations that people have complained about we would be choosing to fail at this goal... and in doing so we would make the fruits of our labor less useful to the world.
Ultimately, only a judge can decide whether a contribution is in fact a coyright violation. We may suspect copyright violations; we may demand that a contributor accept responsibility (and define what that means), but we can rarely make a definitive statement that a particular writing or image is in fact a violation.
In short, while being a nice legal fall-back, the safe harbor terms are not anything we want to rely on in terms of our copyright policy.
It's not merely a fall back, but a first step in arriving at a formal decision. When a properly composed notice is issued we must remove the offending material.
Ec
On 7/24/06, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
- It is ethically questionable. When we distribute someone's
commercial work tagged as free content, we risk seriously letting the genie out of the bottle. It would do us no good to gain a napster-like reputation.
What makes it unethical? Is it any more ethical to deprive people of due process if they can make a reasonable legal case. This is not a matter of agreeing to every stupid argument that comes along. This has nothing to do with genies or Napster.
There is nothing unethical about removing content from our site which is in clear violation. Submitters of content are not entitled to due process. Wikipedia is not a courtroom.
It is, however, clearly unethical to distribute the copyrighted content of others without their authorization.
If the copyright paranoiacs want to put themselves into a panic, why should the rest of us fall into line with them. Each case needs to be judged on its own merits.
We can not afford, in terms of liability or available resources, to make a legally sound deep analysis for every image on a case by case basis. A simplified approach is required. Fortunately our project isn't centered around distributing legally questionable content, so rules which are more conservative then they need to be legally are generally acceptable.
Each incident is separate, and other instances would be inadmissible as evidence to prove that a specific incident is an infringement. This position is pure speculation.
Do you honestly believe that a judge would ignore evidence supporting a continued and willful violation of the law in making a determination?
Ultimately, only a judge can decide whether a contribution is in fact a coyright violation. We may suspect copyright violations; we may demand that a contributor accept responsibility (and define what that means), but we can rarely make a definitive statement that a particular writing or image is in fact a violation.
It's a dangerous game you propose here.
A majority of items taken down for copyright infringement are fairly clear cut: the submitter uploaded content for which he is not the copyright holder, no license grant has been provided by the copyright holder, and the material is clearly new enough to be covered by copyright.
It would seem that you are proposing in these cases that we ignore the obviousness of the violation and wait for a properly formed DMCA takedown notice before taking action. Since you're so sure that this is an acceptable solution are you able to provide the Wikimedia Foundation with indemnity from losses resulting from taking your legal advice?
In short, while being a nice legal fall-back, the safe harbor terms are not anything we want to rely on in terms of our copyright policy.
It's not merely a fall back, but a first step in arriving at a formal decision. When a properly composed notice is issued we must remove the offending material.
It seems to me that you've forgotten that one of the two primary goals of Wikipedia is to provide Free Content. We have failed at that goal when our site contains a huge number of copyright violations waiting for their DMCA notice to come in...
So while it is necessary that we remove content once properly noticed, it is not sufficient for us to wait for that to happen.
Gregory Maxwell wrote:
On 7/24/06, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
- It is ethically questionable. When we distribute someone's
commercial work tagged as free content, we risk seriously letting the genie out of the bottle. It would do us no good to gain a napster-like reputation.
What makes it unethical? Is it any more ethical to deprive people of due process if they can make a reasonable legal case. This is not a matter of agreeing to every stupid argument that comes along. This has nothing to do with genies or Napster.
There is nothing unethical about removing content from our site which is in clear violation. Submitters of content are not entitled to due process. Wikipedia is not a courtroom.
Of course you have arrogated upon yourself the role of being the arbiter of violations. Just because you oppose any kind of fairness in these issues, does not imply that this is a universal sentiment.
It is, however, clearly unethical to distribute the copyrighted content of others without their authorization.
At the rate you're going it would be unethical to quote anybody without their authorization.
If the copyright paranoiacs want to put themselves into a panic, why should the rest of us fall into line with them. Each case needs to be judged on its own merits.
We can not afford, in terms of liability or available resources, to make a legally sound deep analysis for every image on a case by case basis. A simplified approach is required. Fortunately our project isn't centered around distributing legally questionable content, so rules which are more conservative then they need to be legally are generally acceptable.
Why would you want to make these analyses on "every" Image? My complaint is that you wouldn't want to make it on any. Your approach isn't simplified; it's simplistic. A certain degree of conservatism is beneficial, but there still needs to be room for reasonably knowledgeable people to defend what they fairly believe not to be infringement.
Each incident is separate, and other instances would be inadmissible as evidence to prove that a specific incident is an infringement. This position is pure speculation.
Do you honestly believe that a judge would ignore evidence supporting a continued and willful violation of the law in making a determination?
Wilfulness is the element that distinguishes criminal from civil infringement; criminal infringement requires a much higher standard of proof. Until now there has not been a single charge laid so there is no evidence for continued violation. Proving continued violation presumes that every alleged infringement in the series be proven to be an infringement in its own right.
Ultimately, only a judge can decide whether a contribution is in fact a coyright violation. We may suspect copyright violations; we may demand that a contributor accept responsibility (and define what that means), but we can rarely make a definitive statement that a particular writing or image is in fact a violation.
It's a dangerous game you propose here.
What's so dangerous about insisting that contributors accept responsibility for their action, and that WMF clarify its role as an ISP.
A majority of items taken down for copyright infringement are fairly clear cut: the submitter uploaded content for which he is not the copyright holder, no license grant has been provided by the copyright holder, and the material is clearly new enough to be covered by copyright.
A lot of them are clear cut; I'm not disputing that. It will probably also be that many of the apparent violators will not be willing to do what it takes to accept responsibility for their material. Simply making a bald and unsubstantiated claim of fair use is not enough. Some reasonable legal rationale for inclusion would be needed. This would apply to other reasons too, not just fair use.
It would seem that you are proposing in these cases that we ignore the obviousness of the violation and wait for a properly formed DMCA takedown notice before taking action. Since you're so sure that this is an acceptable solution are you able to provide the Wikimedia Foundation with indemnity from losses resulting from taking your legal advice?
Obviousnous is not obvious to everybody. That term is primarily rhetorical. In _some_ cases waiting for some kind of DMCA notice would be the proper course of action, though I suspect that many of these alleged infringements will be taken down long before we get that far anyway.
The losses up to the time of receiving and complying with a takedown order are solely a figment of your imagination, so it would be impossible to determine the value of the indemnity that you want.
In short, while being a nice legal fall-back, the safe harbor terms are not anything we want to rely on in terms of our copyright policy.
It's not merely a fall back, but a first step in arriving at a formal decision. When a properly composed notice is issued we must remove the offending material.
It seems to me that you've forgotten that one of the two primary goals of Wikipedia is to provide Free Content. We have failed at that goal when our site contains a huge number of copyright violations waiting for their DMCA notice to come in...
How many is that? How did you arrive at that figure?
So while it is necessary that we remove content once properly noticed, it is not sufficient for us to wait for that to happen.
A large part probably would still be removed if no one accepts responsibility for it. And if it stays long enough the Statute of Limitations may apply.
Ec
On 24 Jul 2006, at 10:02, Ray Saintonge wrote:
Ultimately, only a judge can decide whether a contribution is in fact a coyright violation. We may suspect copyright violations; we may demand that a contributor accept responsibility (and define what that means), but we can rarely make a definitive statement that a particular writing or image is in fact a violation.
It's a dangerous game you propose here.
What's so dangerous about insisting that contributors accept responsibility for their action, and that WMF clarify its role as an ISP.
One important reason is that the foundation does take an editorial interest, indeed employs people to deal with content issues, so cannot just claim to be an ISP. Another is that they (or other people) intent to publish print copies and copies in other forms, where liability is clear, and there is no common carrier type argument.
And the whole point was to create a free encyclopaedia remember. Non free content has no place in a free encyclopaedia.
Justinc
Justin Cormack wrote:
On 24 Jul 2006, at 10:02, Ray Saintonge wrote:
Ultimately, only a judge can decide whether a contribution is in fact a coyright violation. We may suspect copyright violations; we may demand that a contributor accept responsibility (and define what that means), but we can rarely make a definitive statement that a particular writing or image is in fact a violation.
It's a dangerous game you propose here.
What's so dangerous about insisting that contributors accept responsibility for their action, and that WMF clarify its role as an ISP.
One important reason is that the foundation does take an editorial interest, indeed employs people to deal with content issues, so cannot just claim to be an ISP. Another is that they (or other people) intent to publish print copies and copies in other forms, where liability is clear, and there is no common carrier type argument.
And the whole point was to create a free encyclopaedia remember. Non free content has no place in a free encyclopaedia.
It does tend to muddy the woaters about editorial control, and this is unfortunately poor strategy. Good business sense would suggest that assets be protected by building a separation between these functions. This does take us into the issue of governance structure, which is better in a separate string.
I know the arguments that distinguish fair use and free use, but the issue is bigger than that distinction. We still need to determine whether the source material is copyrightable in the first place, or whether we are taking it from a source which is itself only copying public domain material and claiming copyright.
Ec
On 7/24/06, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
On 7/24/06, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
- It is ethically questionable. When we distribute someone's
commercial work tagged as free content, we risk seriously letting the genie out of the bottle. It would do us no good to gain a napster-like reputation.
What makes it unethical? Is it any more ethical to deprive people of due process if they can make a reasonable legal case. This is not a matter of agreeing to every stupid argument that comes along. This has nothing to do with genies or Napster.
There is nothing unethical about removing content from our site which is in clear violation. Submitters of content are not entitled to due process. Wikipedia is not a courtroom.
It is, however, clearly unethical to distribute the copyrighted content of others without their authorization.
Even if you're not doing so intentionally? Even if you're just providing a place for people to communicate, and you tell them not to upload copyrighted content, and you remove any copyrighted content that you find? In order to be ethical you have to lock down the system so that copyright violations are impossible? I don't think I can agree with that. In fact, I know I can't agree with that.
In short, while being a nice legal fall-back, the safe harbor terms are not anything we want to rely on in terms of our copyright policy.
It's not merely a fall back, but a first step in arriving at a formal decision. When a properly composed notice is issued we must remove the offending material.
It seems to me that you've forgotten that one of the two primary goals of Wikipedia is to provide Free Content. We have failed at that goal when our site contains a huge number of copyright violations waiting for their DMCA notice to come in...
So while it is necessary that we remove content once properly noticed, it is not sufficient for us to wait for that to happen.
It's unclear to me what Ray Saintonge is suggesting, so I won't speak for him. But I would like to clarify that I personally do not believe that Wikipedia should only take down content when a DMCA notice comes in. In fact, I think the standards for inclusion should be much *more* restrictive than just what is allowed by law.
My response was to someone who was suggesting that locking down the site so that people can't even upload free content without having gained the privilege is necessary to "keep WP out of legal peril". If locking down the site helps Wikipedia create the best free encyclopedia, then I'm all for it. I haven't been convinced that it would. And arguments that not locking down the site would put WP into legal peril are certainly not going to convince me otherwise.
Anthony
On 24/07/06, Anthony wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
My response was to someone who was suggesting that locking down the site so that people can't even upload free content without having gained the privilege is necessary to "keep WP out of legal peril". If locking down the site helps Wikipedia create the best free encyclopedia, then I'm all for it. I haven't been convinced that it would. And arguments that not locking down the site would put WP into legal peril are certainly not going to convince me otherwise.
IMO, if this were done it wouldn't really be Wikipedia any more.
Anthony wrote:
On 7/24/06, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
On 7/24/06, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
- It is ethically questionable. When we distribute someone's
commercial work tagged as free content, we risk seriously letting the genie out of the bottle. It would do us no good to gain a napster-like reputation.
What makes it unethical? Is it any more ethical to deprive people of due process if they can make a reasonable legal case. This is not a matter of agreeing to every stupid argument that comes along. This has nothing to do with genies or Napster.
There is nothing unethical about removing content from our site which is in clear violation. Submitters of content are not entitled to due process. Wikipedia is not a courtroom.
It is, however, clearly unethical to distribute the copyrighted content of others without their authorization.
Even if you're not doing so intentionally? Even if you're just providing a place for people to communicate, and you tell them not to upload copyrighted content, and you remove any copyrighted content that you find? In order to be ethical you have to lock down the system so that copyright violations are impossible? I don't think I can agree with that. In fact, I know I can't agree with that.
If something is impossible it doesn't matter whether anybody agrees with it. ;-) A lock down that would prevent all copyvios is an impossibility unless it locks down all editing; if that happens we don't have much of a project. Copyright rules in an international site are so complex that you can't expect mechanization to take over from human decision making. The thing that's wrong with Gregory's position is his absolute certainty that a particular contribution is an infringement. This leves little room for the possibility that his determination may be in error.
In short, while being a nice legal fall-back, the safe harbor terms are not anything we want to rely on in terms of our copyright policy.
It's not merely a fall back, but a first step in arriving at a formal decision. When a properly composed notice is issued we must remove the offending material.
It seems to me that you've forgotten that one of the two primary goals of Wikipedia is to provide Free Content. We have failed at that goal when our site contains a huge number of copyright violations waiting for their DMCA notice to come in...
So while it is necessary that we remove content once properly noticed, it is not sufficient for us to wait for that to happen.
It's unclear to me what Ray Saintonge is suggesting, so I won't speak for him. But I would like to clarify that I personally do not believe that Wikipedia should only take down content when a DMCA notice comes in. In fact, I think the standards for inclusion should be much *more* restrictive than just what is allowed by law.
Nowhere have I said that every alleged infringement should be preserved until there is a DMCA notice. I am saying that all such notices should be made public, and I am saying that those with a reasonable case for inclusion should have the opportunity of receiving one. In practical terms most people who add copyvio material haven't got a clue about copyright law, and would quickly fail the minimum standards for making a case. That material would soon be gone anyway. Assuming good faith may let the process take a little longer, but would change very few outcomes.
My response was to someone who was suggesting that locking down the site so that people can't even upload free content without having gained the privilege is necessary to "keep WP out of legal peril". If locking down the site helps Wikipedia create the best free encyclopedia, then I'm all for it. I haven't been convinced that it would. And arguments that not locking down the site would put WP into legal peril are certainly not going to convince me otherwise.
Sometimes it seems that those who would impose such drastic measures for the sake of "keeping WP out of legal peril" know as little about copyright law as their opposite numbers who are regularly uploading the material. They only differ in being on opposite sides of the issue.
Ec
On 7/25/06, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Anthony wrote:
My response was to someone who was suggesting that locking down the site so that people can't even upload free content without having gained the privilege is necessary to "keep WP out of legal peril". If locking down the site helps Wikipedia create the best free encyclopedia, then I'm all for it. I haven't been convinced that it would. And arguments that not locking down the site would put WP into legal peril are certainly not going to convince me otherwise.
Sometimes it seems that those who would impose such drastic measures for the sake of "keeping WP out of legal peril" know as little about copyright law as their opposite numbers who are regularly uploading the material. They only differ in being on opposite sides of the issue.
Ec
I think this is absolutely the case. And I also think that's why legal compliance issues should be left to the official agents of the organization to worry about.
The focus of the rest of us should be on how to make the best free encyclopedia. Sure, this means not including copyright violations, but not with the sense of urgency that some seem to be suggesting. Such a focus would also imply that images which aren't included in any pages, and images which are only included on user pages (for instance), are an even lower priority.
How do we make the best free encyclopedia? Is it by making it easier to upload images, or harder?
Anthony
On 7/26/06, Anthony wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
How do we make the best free encyclopedia? Is it by making it easier to upload images, or harder?
Harder. There are too many images being uploaded each day. Many of the ones labeled as "free" aren't, and at the current rate of uploads, nobody has a chance to investigate.
Which is freer? A copyvio labeled as CC-BY-SA, or no image at all?
On 7/26/06, Anthony wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
I think this is absolutely the case. And I also think that's why legal compliance issues should be left to the official agents of the organization to worry about.
The focus of the rest of us should be on how to make the best free encyclopedia. Sure, this means not including copyright violations, but not with the sense of urgency that some seem to be suggesting.
Copyviois disscourage people from going to the effort to create free content.
Such a focus would also imply that images which aren't included in any pages, and images which are only included on user pages (for instance), are an even lower priority.
They are however easy targets. Dealing with boarderline fair use stuff is a pain so we tend to focus on the easy stuff first in order than limited rescources have the biggest impact.
On 7/21/06, Anthony wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
On 7/21/06, Stan Shebs shebs@apple.com wrote:
If you have a suggestion that doesn't involve large numbers of nonexistent volunteers working all hours to keep WP out of legal peril, feel free to enlighten us.
Here's one: when people send in a DMCA takedown notice, remove the material, notify the uploader that her materials have been removed (via their talk page and email if the address is known), and provide them with an opportunity to send a written notice to the service provider stating that the material has been wrongly removed. If the uploader provides a proper "counter-notice" claiming that the material does not infringe copyrights, then promptly notify the claiming party of the individual's objection. However, only restore the image if there is also a consensus that the image is "free enough" within the project's guidelines.
Anthony
I'm not sure the DMCA system exists under England and Wales law and the evidece suggests the courts will think wikipedia is within their juristiction. You are reduced to gambleing on their being no way for the foundation to suffer any monitery hurt from the uk.
What about the Netherlands? Or france? Or Korea. Do they follow the DMCA system?
On 7/21/06, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 7/21/06, Anthony wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
On 7/21/06, Stan Shebs shebs@apple.com wrote:
If you have a suggestion that doesn't involve large numbers of nonexistent volunteers working all hours to keep WP out of legal peril, feel free to enlighten us.
Here's one: when people send in a DMCA takedown notice, remove the material, notify the uploader that her materials have been removed (via their talk page and email if the address is known), and provide them with an opportunity to send a written notice to the service provider stating that the material has been wrongly removed. If the uploader provides a proper "counter-notice" claiming that the material does not infringe copyrights, then promptly notify the claiming party of the individual's objection. However, only restore the image if there is also a consensus that the image is "free enough" within the project's guidelines.
Anthony
I'm not sure the DMCA system exists under England and Wales law and the evidece suggests the courts will think wikipedia is within their juristiction. You are reduced to gambleing on their being no way for the foundation to suffer any monitery hurt from the uk.
What about the Netherlands? Or france? Or Korea. Do they follow the DMCA system?
Fair enough. Of course, short of shutting down the Internet (or at least refusing to serve content to countries with ridiculous copyright laws), I'm not sure what can be done.
Anthony
On 7/22/06, Anthony wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
Fair enough. Of course, short of shutting down the Internet (or at least refusing to serve content to countries with ridiculous copyright laws), I'm not sure what can be done.
Anthony
Use free content as much as posible and take actions that will reduce the number of copyvios uploaded.
Anthony wrote:
On 7/21/06, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 7/21/06, Anthony wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
On 7/21/06, Stan Shebs shebs@apple.com wrote:
If you have a suggestion that doesn't involve large numbers of nonexistent volunteers working all hours to keep WP out of legal peril, feel free to enlighten us.
Here's one: when people send in a DMCA takedown notice, remove the material, notify the uploader that her materials have been removed (via their talk page and email if the address is known), and provide them with an opportunity to send a written notice to the service provider stating that the material has been wrongly removed. If the uploader provides a proper "counter-notice" claiming that the material does not infringe copyrights, then promptly notify the claiming party of the individual's objection. However, only restore the image if there is also a consensus that the image is "free enough" within the project's guidelines.
Anthony
I'm not sure the DMCA system exists under England and Wales law and the evidece suggests the courts will think wikipedia is within their juristiction. You are reduced to gambleing on their being no way for the foundation to suffer any monitery hurt from the uk.
What about the Netherlands? Or france? Or Korea. Do they follow the DMCA system?
Fair enough. Of course, short of shutting down the Internet (or at least refusing to serve content to countries with ridiculous copyright laws), I'm not sure what can be done.
In the absence of some willingness to confront these issues, we keep issuing our own judgements against ourselves. This can only lead to being bogged down in a legal web of our own making. We don't need to defend every last claim of copyvio that comes along, but showing a litle courage would be nice.
Ec
On 7/24/06, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
In the absence of some willingness to confront these issues, we keep issuing our own judgements against ourselves. This can only lead to being bogged down in a legal web of our own making. We don't need to defend every last claim of copyvio that comes along, but showing a litle courage would be nice.
Courage?
Courage is when we step up and delete material which is not free content, material which is questionably legal. Courage is trusting our contributors to create content which is clearly and confidently free. Courage is knowing that a loss of content will not be permanent because we can create our own and that we are not so unskilled that we must better our project by taking from others.
Should we ever do as proposed and try to hide behind legal loopholes and legislated mandated snipe hunts in order to continue to distribute content which our contributors did not create, content which violates our goal of Free content... than I would call that cowardice indeed.
Gregory Maxwell wrote:
On 7/24/06, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
In the absence of some willingness to confront these issues, we keep issuing our own judgements against ourselves. This can only lead to being bogged down in a legal web of our own making. We don't need to defend every last claim of copyvio that comes along, but showing a litle courage would be nice.
Courage?
Courage is when we step up and delete material which is not free content, material which is questionably legal. Courage is trusting our contributors to create content which is clearly and confidently free. Courage is knowing that a loss of content will not be permanent because we can create our own and that we are not so unskilled that we must better our project by taking from others.
Should we ever do as proposed and try to hide behind legal loopholes and legislated mandated snipe hunts in order to continue to distribute content which our contributors did not create, content which violates our goal of Free content... than I would call that cowardice indeed.
I have no intention of hiding behind legal loopholes; I am quite willing to be perfectly open about which legal rights I am invoking as the situation requires. Taking from other sources does not autoomatically imply copyright violation as you seem to suggest. To be sure it needs to be credited to avoid plagiarism, but that's a different matter.
Ec
Anthony wrote:
On 7/21/06, Stan Shebs shebs@apple.com wrote:
If you have a suggestion that doesn't involve large numbers of nonexistent volunteers working all hours to keep WP out of legal peril, feel free to enlighten us.
Here's one: when people send in a DMCA takedown notice, remove the material, notify the uploader that her materials have been removed (via their talk page and email if the address is known), and provide them with an opportunity to send a written notice to the service provider stating that the material has been wrongly removed. If the uploader provides a proper "counter-notice" claiming that the material does not infringe copyrights, then promptly notify the claiming party of the individual's objection. However, only restore the image if there is also a consensus that the image is "free enough" within the project's guidelines.
I've been saying something like this all along. The law requires that the uploader be notified anyway. Furthermore, all others who have added to the article have had their work deleted too, so they too should be notified. A counter-notice can be issued by anyone; there is no need to have standing as there is to issue a takedown notice. Better to make the text of all takedown notices public.
Ec
On 21/07/06, Stan Shebs shebs@apple.com wrote:
But notice it says "edit", not "upload to".
Editing Wikipedia is uploading. Sometimes a user uploads text, sometimes they upload other forms of data such as images and music.
If you have a suggestion that doesn't involve large numbers of nonexistent volunteers working all hours to keep WP out of legal peril, feel free to enlighten us.
Wikipedia already carries out tasks which require large numbers of volunteers working all hours to keep WP out of legal peril. I'm saying it is worth working a little harder to keep our values alive.
On 7/21/06, Oldak Quill oldakquill@gmail.com wrote:
Wikipedia already carries out tasks which require large numbers of volunteers working all hours to keep WP out of legal peril. I'm saying it is worth working a little harder to keep our values alive.
[[Category:Promotional images]]
By 22:00 UTC tomorrow, I expect you to have checked every image on the first page of that category. For the images that did not actually come from a [[press kit]], I expect you to remove the license tag from the image, retag it as {{subst:nld}}, and explain to the uploader why their image is not really a promotional image. If the image also doesn't have proper source information, add the {{subst:nsd}} tag as well, and explain why images need source information. You don't need to remove the images from articles using them, since OrphanBot will get around to it in a few days, but you do need to watchlist all the images to make sure nobody puts an incorrect license tag on before the image is deleted.
Congratulations, you will have reduced the total number of improper {{promophoto}} claims by 0.1%!
On 22/07/06, Mark Wagner carnildo@gmail.com wrote:
[[Category:Promotional images]]
By 22:00 UTC tomorrow, I expect you to have checked every image on the first page of that category. For the images that did not actually come from a [[press kit]], I expect you to remove the license tag from the image, retag it as {{subst:nld}}, and explain to the uploader why their image is not really a promotional image. If the image also doesn't have proper source information, add the {{subst:nsd}} tag as well, and explain why images need source information. You don't need to remove the images from articles using them, since OrphanBot will get around to it in a few days, but you do need to watchlist all the images to make sure nobody puts an incorrect license tag on before the image is deleted.
Congratulations, you will have reduced the total number of improper {{promophoto}} claims by 0.1%!
We could always go the German way and prevent all non-copyleft images.
PS. I just wanted to check I was accurate in making this statement. I decided Coca Cola would be a good article to use to check (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca_Cola) as they are presumably unable to display the logo. They do show the logo in the form of photographs of the side of lorries showing the logo and practically nothing else. Surely such a photo can't be claimed to be copyleft?
On 7/21/06, Oldak Quill oldakquill@gmail.com wrote:
We could always go the German way and prevent all non-copyleft images.
PS. I just wanted to check I was accurate in making this statement. I decided Coca Cola would be a good article to use to check (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca_Cola) as they are presumably unable to display the logo. They do show the logo in the form of photographs of the side of lorries showing the logo and practically nothing else. Surely such a photo can't be claimed to be copyleft?
German copyright law has a clause that states that if you take a picture of anything displayed in a public place, you've got a free and clear copyright on that picture, and can license it however you want. I suspect that's what they're using to justify the picture. There's no equivalent in US copyright law.
On 7/21/06, Oldak Quill oldakquill@gmail.com wrote: [snip]
We could always go the German way and prevent all non-copyleft images.
PS. I just wanted to check I was accurate in making this statement. I decided Coca Cola would be a good article to use to check (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca_Cola) as they are presumably unable to display the logo. They do show the logo in the form of photographs of the side of lorries showing the logo and practically nothing else. Surely such a photo can't be claimed to be copyleft?
This is a complex issue involving a lot of handwaving and bullshit.
In germany they have a legal concept called "right of panorama" which appears to be intended to address cases of incidental inclusion (as we'd know them in the US). The idea is that the fact that the populated world is saturated with copyrighted works shouldn't inhibit you from taking pictures in public...
However, when you turn around and use such an image as a direct replacement for the copyrighted work which you, presumably, couldn't use there is no way that you'd be able to claim incidental inclusion in the US. I'm not qualified to say what the decision would be in Germany, but I'd really be surprised if it were any different.
Legally Wikimedia is likely okay because these works would easily be considered fair use... But they aren't free content when used in the capacity... but use adds a whole extra dimension the people would rather ignore.
At least dewiki has stopped trying to call the tightly cropped logo images which were nearly indistinguishable from a normal image of the logo free images. :)
On 22/07/06, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
This is a complex issue involving a lot of handwaving and bullshit.
In germany they have a legal concept called "right of panorama" which appears to be intended to address cases of incidental inclusion (as we'd know them in the US). The idea is that the fact that the populated world is saturated with copyrighted works shouldn't inhibit you from taking pictures in public...
However, when you turn around and use such an image as a direct replacement for the copyrighted work which you, presumably, couldn't use there is no way that you'd be able to claim incidental inclusion in the US. I'm not qualified to say what the decision would be in Germany, but I'd really be surprised if it were any different.
Aren't the images are still stored in Florida so are covered by US law? Why is German law at all considered?
Legally Wikimedia is likely okay because these works would easily be considered fair use... But they aren't free content when used in the capacity... but use adds a whole extra dimension the people would rather ignore.
To be OK don't we have to attach a fair use rational to these photographs?
On 7/21/06, Oldak Quill oldakquill@gmail.com wrote:
On 22/07/06, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
This is a complex issue involving a lot of handwaving and bullshit.
In germany they have a legal concept called "right of panorama" which appears to be intended to address cases of incidental inclusion (as we'd know them in the US). The idea is that the fact that the populated world is saturated with copyrighted works shouldn't inhibit you from taking pictures in public...
However, when you turn around and use such an image as a direct replacement for the copyrighted work which you, presumably, couldn't use there is no way that you'd be able to claim incidental inclusion in the US. I'm not qualified to say what the decision would be in Germany, but I'd really be surprised if it were any different.
Aren't the images are still stored in Florida so are covered by US law? Why is German law at all considered?
Because the photograph is taken on German soil by a German photographer. Consequently, whether or not it is legal to take the photo is covered by German law.
On 22/07/06, Mark Wagner carnildo@gmail.com wrote:
Because the photograph is taken on German soil by a German photographer. Consequently, whether or not it is legal to take the photo is covered by German law.
Ah, I had thought the laws of the country in which the image is stored are the only ones which apply to the content. For example, if a pornographic picture is taken of a minor in a country in which it is legal to take such pictures, it would still be illegal to store the image on US servers (where the content is illegal).
On 7/21/06, Oldak Quill oldakquill@gmail.com wrote:
Aren't the images are still stored in Florida so are covered by US law? Why is German law at all considered?
:) Indeed. Because the uploader is in Germany.. It's messy. It's not a problem because these images are likely legal in the US.
Legally Wikimedia is likely okay because these works would easily be considered fair use... But they aren't free content when used in the capacity... but use adds a whole extra dimension the people would rather ignore.
To be OK don't we have to attach a fair use rational to these photographs?
The law doesn't require us to attach a fair use rationale. Policy on enwiki does. It would be required, were we ever to use fair use as a defense (it's not a permission it's a defense), that we provide a rationale... Doesn't mean the image must have one now.
So long as we don't run into an image which would likely be illegal in the US but is legal in De, I don't think it's worth dealing with this mess. :)
Gregory Maxwell wrote:
On 7/21/06, Oldak Quill oldakquill@gmail.com wrote: [snip]
We could always go the German way and prevent all non-copyleft images.
PS. I just wanted to check I was accurate in making this statement. I decided Coca Cola would be a good article to use to check (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca_Cola) as they are presumably unable to display the logo. They do show the logo in the form of photographs of the side of lorries showing the logo and practically nothing else. Surely such a photo can't be claimed to be copyleft?
In germany they have a legal concept called "right of panorama" which appears to be intended to address cases of incidental inclusion (as we'd know them in the US). The idea is that the fact that the populated world is saturated with copyrighted works shouldn't inhibit you from taking pictures in public...
In the US much of this would be covered by the "scènes à faire" doctrine.
Ec
Oldak Quill wrote:
On 22/07/06, Mark Wagner carnildo@gmail.com wrote:
[[Category:Promotional images]]
By 22:00 UTC tomorrow, I expect you to have checked every image on the first page of that category. For the images that did not actually come from a [[press kit]], I expect you to remove the license tag from the image, retag it as {{subst:nld}}, and explain to the uploader why their image is not really a promotional image. If the image also doesn't have proper source information, add the {{subst:nsd}} tag as well, and explain why images need source information. You don't need to remove the images from articles using them, since OrphanBot will get around to it in a few days, but you do need to watchlist all the images to make sure nobody puts an incorrect license tag on before the image is deleted.
Congratulations, you will have reduced the total number of improper {{promophoto}} claims by 0.1%!
We could always go the German way and prevent all non-copyleft images.
PS. I just wanted to check I was accurate in making this statement. I decided Coca Cola would be a good article to use to check (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca_Cola) as they are presumably unable to display the logo. They do show the logo in the form of photographs of the side of lorries showing the logo and practically nothing else. Surely such a photo can't be claimed to be copyleft?
I would be very surprised if the Coca-Cola Company has ever complained about the use of its logo in any informative material. They're smart enough to know that showing the logo is good advertising for them.
Ec
On 7/24/06, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
I would be very surprised if the Coca-Cola Company has ever complained about the use of its logo in any informative material. They're smart enough to know that showing the logo is good advertising for them.
We can't permit users to use "no one will complain" as a justification in our policy because we can not expect a substantial percentage of the editing community to be qualified to make such judgements.
We have, in fact, had places where people claimed that "no one would complain" when later the copyright holder did end up finding the violation and issuing a complaint.
Even cases that would seem safe to well considered analysis are not always so sound. A "it's free promotion" argument quickly turns to dust when our NPOV article fairly covers the latest scandal that the subject would like hidden under a rug... and their "they won't complain" quickly turns into prosecution.
Gregory Maxwell wrote:
On 7/24/06, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
I would be very surprised if the Coca-Cola Company has ever complained about the use of its logo in any informative material. They're smart enough to know that showing the logo is good advertising for them.
We can't permit users to use "no one will complain" as a justification in our policy because we can not expect a substantial percentage of the editing community to be qualified to make such judgements.
We have, in fact, had places where people claimed that "no one would complain" when later the copyright holder did end up finding the violation and issuing a complaint.
Even cases that would seem safe to well considered analysis are not always so sound. A "it's free promotion" argument quickly turns to dust when our NPOV article fairly covers the latest scandal that the subject would like hidden under a rug... and their "they won't complain" quickly turns into prosecution.
We are talking about logos here, and logos are designed to put forth the company's brand. There can even be an argument that logos are not copyrightable, but are covered by trademark law instead. In any event the Coca-Cola logo came on the market before 1923, and would be in the public domain for the purpose of copyright.
Do you have any case law to support your position on logos.
Ec
On 7/21/06, Oldak Quill oldakquill@gmail.com wrote:
We have already stripped new users and anons of far too many rights.
[snip]
It is clear that we have completely lost sight of the original aims of Wikipedia.
(As an aside, it is bad form to reply to *me* to oppose someone elses position which I don't share)
I'd really like to find out where you got this bizarre notion that Wikipedia's orignal aim was to provide "rights" to new users and "anons".
Wikipedia exists to make a Free Content Encyclopedia. It turns out that being promiscuous about who we allow to edit helps that goal rather well. That does not imply that all forms of promiscuity are beneficial. I expect you agree with this, or do you think we should post our root passwords on the website too? Once you have admitted that there must be limitations, it simply becomes a matter of discussing what those limits should be.
I'd like to think that such discussions should be allowed to continue dispassionately and without attracting hysterical cries about "destroying the project" or "stripping rights".
On 21/07/06, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
(As an aside, it is bad form to reply to *me* to oppose someone elses position which I don't share)
This wasn't done with malice, it was purely accidental.
I'd really like to find out where you got this bizarre notion that Wikipedia's orignal aim was to provide "rights" to new users and "anons".
"Welcome to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit." (from [[Wikipedia:About]]). The statement "anyone can edit" requires that editing rights are given to new users and anons.
Wikipedia exists to make a Free Content Encyclopedia. It turns out that being promiscuous about who we allow to edit helps that goal rather well. That does not imply that all forms of promiscuity are beneficial. I expect you agree with this, or do you think we should post our root passwords on the website too? Once you have admitted that there must be limitations, it simply becomes a matter of discussing what those limits should be.
I would suggest we stop claiming that "anyone can edit" the project. It is a misleading and false.
I'd like to think that such discussions should be allowed to continue dispassionately and without attracting hysterical cries about "destroying the project" or "stripping rights".
I used these words because they match my perception of what is happening. I strive to avoid sensationalism at all costs.
On 7/21/06, Oldak Quill oldakquill@gmail.com wrote:
This wasn't done with malice, it was purely accidental.
Thats okay. :) No harm no foul. Just wanted to point it out.
I'd really like to find out where you got this bizarre notion that Wikipedia's orignal aim was to provide "rights" to new users and "anons".
"Welcome to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit." (from [[Wikipedia:About]]). The statement "anyone can edit" requires that editing rights are given to new users and anons.
No it doesn't. Anyone can still edit if you have to sign up and wait. Not that I'm proposing such a thing, but it doesn't remove the 'anyone can edit'.
I would suggest we stop claiming that "anyone can edit" the project. It is a misleading and false.
I would suggest you stop blowing hot air. Your statement above is exactly the sort of hysteria that is counter productive. If you have a material complaint related to how a proposed change would harm our ability to make a free content encyclopedia, make it.. otherwise spare us the drama of "misleading and false".
I used these words because they match my perception of what is happening. I strive to avoid sensationalism at all costs.
Oh? Your recent posts (which I read but mostly do not respond to) have caused me to conclude otherwise.
If you'd like to operate a fork where the ability to edit is placed above all concerns of quality, stability, or morality, I'd be glad to help you. I'd offer to provide hosting too but I wouldn't want any part of the legal liability for such a site. :)
Oldak Quill wrote:
I would suggest we stop claiming that "anyone can edit" the project. It is a misleading and false.
This has been suggested quite often. We even have a concrete proposal for the new slogan, based on the one used on the German Wikipedia: "good authors are always welcome".
I expect it'll eventually get changed, once the organizational inertia is overcome. Not necessarily to the version propsed above, but to _something_ other than the current slogan. The one we've got now isn't really very good, for precisely the reason quoted above; it also tends to get interpreted by some people as "anything goes" or "no editorial control", which can create an unfavorable first impression.
Oldak Quill wrote:
On 21/07/06, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
On 7/21/06, Mark Wagner carnildo@gmail.com wrote:
By making image uploading a privilege to be earned rather than a right conferred by registering an account, we can relax the policy and deal with uploaders individually, rather than automated notification of problems and nearly-automated deletion of problematic images.
We have already stripped new users and anons of far too many rights. We have already gone through the creation of semi-protection, the prevention of page creation, and now we have a suggestion that we prevent them uploading! It is an utter disgrace that we still refer to ourselves as an encyclopedia that "anyone can edit".
It is clear that we have completely lost sight of the original aims of Wikipedia.
An important and valid point. The erosion has come gradually. It's naturally frustrating when the silly kids keep doing the same thing, but patient explanations and discussions can still be more fruitful than citing rules.
Ec
On 7/21/06, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
On 7/21/06, Mark Wagner carnildo@gmail.com wrote: [snip]
Much of the image deletion policy is based around the fact that there are maybe a dozen people on Wikipedia who understand the image use policy well enough to enforce it, and are willing to take the time to do so. At the same time, over two thousand new images are uploaded each day, adding to the 553,000 images already on Wikipedia.
By making image uploading a privilege to be earned rather than a right conferred by registering an account, we can relax the policy and deal with uploaders individually, rather than automated notification of problems and nearly-automated deletion of problematic images.
I, too, have faced all the challenges that you mention in your email... I especially 'enjoy' watching someone play license template roulette. :-/ But I don't believe it would be wise to turn off image uploads.
What you say about copyright being hard is mostly true, but I think that what matters more than it being difficult is that it doesn't match up to people's natural instincts. They think "I got this off a webpage for free so it must be okay." or "No one will complain".
That's my point with "they don't understand it, and aren't aware they don't understand it".
In any case, I think the worry about copyright is ignoring the real problem: WE DON'T HAVE ENOUGH PHOTOGRAPHERS! Even if we ignore the advantages of being able to work with the creator, when the copyright holder uploads their own content our problems are greatly reduced.
At the same time, we have no incentive to increase the number of photographers. When you can just grab a picture off the web and stick it in an article, there's no incentive to get out there and start taking pictures. It's not like digital cameras are hard to come by -- every other cell phone has one, and cheap dedicated cameras can be had for $50-$75.
We could also replace the upload link in the standard public skin with an instruction page... and require people to redlink images in order to upload them. (This would reduce the huge number of images which spend their whole life orphaned, freeing up our resources.. and would require new uploaders to read a bit in order to figure it out).
That would certainly help. Part of the problem is that it's so easy to upload images, people are surprised when they get it wrong, and they haven't been around long enough to know how to fix things, or where to go for help.
On 7/21/06, Mark Wagner carnildo@gmail.com wrote:
On 7/21/06, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
In any case, I think the worry about copyright is ignoring the real problem: WE DON'T HAVE ENOUGH PHOTOGRAPHERS! Even if we ignore the advantages of being able to work with the creator, when the copyright holder uploads their own content our problems are greatly reduced.
At the same time, we have no incentive to increase the number of photographers. When you can just grab a picture off the web and stick it in an article, there's no incentive to get out there and start taking pictures. It's not like digital cameras are hard to come by -- every other cell phone has one, and cheap dedicated cameras can be had for $50-$75.
And anyone notice Fir2000, one of our best photographers (brilliant in my opinion), has mentioned he's thinking about hanging it up? Think we don't have enough photographers NOW? :-( --LV
On 7/21/06, Lord Voldemort lordbishopvoldemort@gmail.com wrote:
And anyone notice Fir2000, one of our best photographers (brilliant in my opinion), has mentioned he's thinking about hanging it up? Think we don't have enough photographers NOW? :-( --LV
D'oh... his actual user name is User:Fir0002. I guess I got too anxious to check my spelling. Sorry for any confusion. ;-) --LV