Hi Rex

A bunch of comments

First, Yann has been a contributor for many years and is very involved in the open source movement (one might even say that he is a bit of an extremist on the topic ;)). So, please consider that he is knowledgeable on the topic. Do not hesitate to seek his help to do the best.

Second, Yann is French, but is mostly living in India (I do not know where he lives right now). So, whilst India and France are indeed on the other side of Earth, please do not take it as the fight of the rich white men in developped world against poor Africa. It would be inappropriate and I really wish we avoid this type of approach generally.

Third, I am not surprised at all by his list of "images to be deleted" and ... I would have done the same if I were a cleaner on Commons. The images listed are obviously of professional quality, done by a professional photographer. It is clearly not amateur pictures. In such cases, it is ABSOLUTLY required that the copyright owner provides an authorization to be archived on OTRS ( the procedure was provided to you in a previous email). With no such authorization, the images MUST be deleted because in the very large majority of cases, these are copyright violations.

Fourth, in most cases of pictures of celebrities taken by photographers, photographers (or the professional studio they work with) stay the copyright owners. And this whatever the country you live in. It is quite unusual that celebrity "buy" the full copyright rights. It is quite frequent that a celebrity wants her picture on Wikipedia (or complain that the one there is not the RIGHT one and ask you to replace it with another). In this case, she will send you a picture, saying "yes, you can use it". THIS IS NOT SUFFICIENT. You need to obtain an official authorization from the copyright holder, per email.
It does not matter whether you live in Africa or elsewhere, this is the same for everyone.

If the copyright owner can NOT be identified... then you can not use the picture. Period.

How do we solve this ? Well,
1) either the celeb gets no picture on her wikipedia article
2) or you convince her to provide you with another picture, with the official authorization provided by the copyright owner
3) or you go and visit her (if she accept) and you take a picture
4) or you participate to a public event (such as Festival de Cannes in France or a book fair) and you take shots

You better be a good photographer and have nice camera in the last two cases...

Florence


 Le 04/03/15 21:38, Nkansah Rexford a écrit :

@bobby the issue of copyright on images can be very stretchy I most times don't fight about.

Photographer who took the celeb's picture. A funny scenario can be this:

I'm a celeb, at an occasion, I realized I looked awesome so I asked someone I dont know to use my phone take a quick shot of me.

I wanna put the image on Commons so I go look for that stranger and put his name on. Come on.

A similar instance is with these celebs. Some are photoshoots where the studio or photographer can be tracked. In many similar instances, it follows the scenario above. So who's the copyright owner?


On Wed, Mar 4, 2015, 20:34 bobby shabangu <bobbyshabangu@gmail.com> wrote:

Thanks for the links Ian, I'm however still confused about the thousands of pictures used in Wikipedia from Flickr !!  Do you know anything about that ??

Felix expect a follow up email from Theresa ( she'll be in contact with all the user groups as well) to find out how far they are with the recommendations/proporsals/decisions taken from the indaba.

On 04.03.2015 21:15, Nkansah Rexford wrote:
Sorry Emmanuel, I didnt do English at school extensively, could you
please rephrase this statement?

"But, as a
reminder: the owner of the copyright of a photography is the
"photograph", not the subject who is photographed."

You have written on Yann's talk page
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Yann#copyright_whatever

"Those images were explicitly emailed to me from the celebs.", a sentence which sounds like an argument proving that this is OK for you to put them online on commons.wikimedia.org.

But, in a normal case, the celebrity does not have any right on these pictures. The photograph who has shot the picture owns the copyright, not the celebrity.

Emmanuel

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