Re: [Wiki Loves Monuments] The Europeana Awareness project and Wikimedia Sweden

Hi Nicu, First of all I have to point out that I am no copyright expert and I hope that I haven't misunderstood anything, but these are my initial thoughts about the issue that you bring up. As I have understood it when reading Commons:Freedom of panorama, most (if not all?) European states have the rule that public art that was created by an artist that died 70 years ago can be uploaded under a license suitable for Wikimedia Commons (in the list on Commons countries such as Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Hungary, Iceland, Lithuania and Luxembourg does not specify this with the note, so I am not sure about them. Are they different in this aspect?). As I see it, even with newer pieces of art removed, the older art pieces still opens up for a vast amount of objects to take photos of! Also, some countries, such as Sweden, Germany, Austria and the Netherlands (to mention a few), have very generous copyright legislation and that opens up for even more art photos from those countries! The official lists with public artwork that we can get our hands on should of course ideally be modified to remove the objects that are not within Freedom of panorama so that people does not spend time taking pictures of them just to have them deleted later. Hopefully the lists provided will contain enough data for us to do so easily. Hopefully we will have the possibility to use the judicial experts that are associated with the Europeana Awareness project to help us out when preparing for this and help us make rational decisions. Frankly, I would think that our problem will be that the lists with objects that people can take photos of will be to big to get an overview over, and not the opposite... All of this is however something that we obviously will have to discuss further. Finally, if some countries' copyright legislation just makes Wiki Loves Public Art impossible we will just have to leave those countries out for now and hope that they will change their legislation in the future! All the best, John