2012/9/2 Racso racso@colombia.com:
Algo más: southtyrol aparece como país, pero hasta donde tengo entendido esas imágenes son parte de WLM Italia.
Ciao Oscar, the point is the following: * Last year Italy didn't participate for legal difficulties related to the fact that Italian law requires an authorisation for taking photos of anything considered "Cultural Heritage" (in Italy, we don't have Panorama freedom). We contacted the Ministry of Arts and Cultural Heritage and tried to find a solution but with little luck. You may ask if the problem persist and the answer is yes, but we are close to a partial solution with the Ministry this year, which I hope will come in the next few days. (I say "partial" because as you can see here[1] we have a limited list of monuments which can participate in Wiki Loves Monuments, which are the ones for which we have got an explicit authorisation. Without dwelling too much into the legal details, the problem is not about the copyright of the photo, but about the possible use that Italian law permits of a photo which depicts a monument, in particular if you want to use a photo in print for commercial purpose, you have to ask for an additional permission which is granted individually to a person (the editor), and for a given publication upon payment of an amount of money). * Last year, though, South Tyrol participated in Wiki Loves Monuments with the Austrian Chapter. In fact the Trentino Alto-Adige region in Italy is a "regione a statuto speciale" and in particular the "provincia autonoma di Bolzano" is a "provincia autonoma" meaning that they have more autonomy (Alto Adige is the Italian name of South Tirol). So a local group of volunteers coordinated to participate in WLM and they choose Austria since Austria was participating in WLM and Italy not. Also, in South Tirol German is an official language. I don't know what was the status of the monuments which participated for South Tyrol last year with regard of the authorisation problem, but if I'm correct the volunteers that contacted us this year said they were in contact with some local institution. So I'm not sure about that.
We have a similar situation with monuments in the city of Alghero-L'Alguer in Sardinia, with monuments that are participating in the catalan Wiki Loves Monuments (i.e. WLM Andorra, if I'm correct).
Needless to say, we would like to have this monuments participate in the Italian contest, but we need the permissions for all the monuments and then they could not participate in another contest since that would be unfair.
Cristian
[1]http://it.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Progetto:Wiki_Loves_Monuments_2012...