Forgive me for being a little bit cynical about this,
but if people are going to be getting all excited
about image use policy shouldn't someone also address
the glaring lack of image dumps.
The last image dump for any project was Novemeber
2005, nearly 15 months ago. Not only that, but even
the links to those very old dumps have been removed
from http://download.wikimedia.org/
Brion has said that this situation was created by a
lack of adequate file servers to handle the very large
(e.g. 400 GB) dumps that would be created now. Even
assumming that is correct, surely WMF can afford the
$15k (or whatever it is) to address this issue.
Personally, I feel that denying reusers prompt
meaningful access to our collected content is a much
more fundemental strike against our freedom than the
general debate around which images are free enough.
-Robert Rohde
User:Dragons_flight on enwiki
____________________________________________________________________________________
Need a quick answer? Get one in minutes from people who know.
Ask your question on www.Answers.yahoo.com
> Incidentally, while looking for an example for my reply I noticed that
> may enwiki articles for ESA subjects have free images. For example
> take a look at [[ERS-1]]. After seeing all these I really wonder if we
> haven't been misthinking our approach to ESA images.
I emailed my ESA and CNES contacts with a summary of the issue. I value transparency.
> And trying to decide what a notable or significant artwork might be
> seems to smack with the same problems that plagues Wikipedia in terms of
> notability of people.
The Foundation already daily receives complaints about deletion of
articles about various artists,
works of art, web comics.
I can understand where Mindspillage et al are getting at (Guernica or
similar works are notable, others aren't)
but, as you rightly point out, this will be fraught with questions like
"why do you have a picture of <insert artist's work>
and not of <insert artist's work>"?
This will be especially acute since, at least I suspect, some comics are
much better known among the people who
read Wikipedia than some allegedly "important" modern artists.
And finally, I don't see why we make an exemption for modern artists and
museums, who live off self-promotion.
So the clarification seems to be:
Replace
"There are some works,
primarily historically important photographs and significant modern
artworks, that we can not realistically expect to be released under a
free content license, but that are hard to discuss in an educational
context without including the media itself."
by
"There are pictures that are very useful to illustrate articles and for
which we cannot
realistically expect to get a free alternative. These include
historically important
photographs and significant modern artworks, as well as pictures of
objects and activities
out of bounds for people able to take free pictures."
Or did I misunderstand?
I really cannot understand a "fair use" allowance that would include
"modern art" but
not activities such as seeing the inside of a space craft, or being
inside a combat unit,
for which access is inherently restricted.
> After seeing all these I really wonder if we
> haven't been misthinking our approach to ESA images.
Please expand. I'm interested in hearing your opinion, since I actually
met ESA and CNES
about the issue and you did not.
(One thing is, for many ESA images, we don't even quite know whether
they're copyrighted
and by whom. But that's a bit complex to explain.)
> I know ESA releases their images under a non-commercial
> use only license, but there have been attempts to try and open that
> licensing up a bit more to something more akin to the standard CC-by-SA
> type license.
"Standard" is overrated. It's "standard" in our little world of free
content providers. :-)
Never forget that most people in the real world have never heard of
content "licenses".
Having been personally involved in the attempts that you mention, I can
tell you that
the issue is really complex. Any attempt at comparing ESA and NASA
completely
misses the difference between legal systems and operating environments.
> trying to milk every last drop of money from
> content produced by salaried employees of these governments
There's something to that but it's not the main issue in the case of ESA.
Please take a look at:
A- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Amazingspiderman50.jpg
B- http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immagine:Spider-Man50_cover.png
Image A is tagged as "fair use" on en.wiki
Image B is basically tagged as "copyrighted, used with permission, NC-ND" on it.wiki
I daresay that most of the italian community thinks that anything different from both A and B have to go or both A and B can stay is simply unacceptable.
So if I understand correctly, we can simply add a second template stating that the image may be considered as fair use in places where this notion exist, and the "fair-use" template overrides the "used with permission NC-ND" template.
It's ok in this way?
Roberto (Snowdog)
P.S.: Strong support for Delphine. Fair use is evil.
------------------------------------------------------
Passa a Infostrada. ADSL e Telefono senza limiti e senza canone Telecom
http://click.libero.it/infostrada9feb07
Waiting for the official resolution, I still do not understand why an
image under fair use should be used in en.wiki (and probably only in
en.wiki) and an image with permission and non-commercial should not be
used on a project where the fair use is "de facto" illegal.
Assuming that both images with permission and fair use images have to be
limited *only* for uses that request necessarily an image and when no
free images are available.
I do not think that even a strong fair use image may be re-used for
commercial purposes.
Moreover considering that images with permission are checked to assure
that they are used only for allowed case (through OTRS), and fair use
images are not.
piero tasso
http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utente:P_tasso
On 2/7/07, Kat Walsh <kwalsh(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
> ...
> The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to develop educational
> content under a free content license or in the public domain. For
> content to be "free content", it must have no significant legal
> restriction on people's freedom to use, redistribute, or modify the
> content for any purpose.
One type of licensing that I think the WMF should consider that would meet
this criteria while still allowing the creation of totally free content is
what I consider a "only in a *Collection License"*.
What I mean by this is that someone should be able to license an
image/video/sound bite, etc to be used freely by the wikimedia community and
any others utilizing wikimedia community content *AS LONG AS *it is part of
a collection and not being redistributed individually (or the works of a
single artist are not the only content distributed).
*WHY*
This type of licensing meets our goals - to provide free educational content
that can be reused and freely distributed. The encyclopedic usage would be
fine, subsets of the encylopedia would be fine. Usage in Wikibooks,
Wikiquote, etc would be allowed. Someone could make derivative works that
are then licensed similarly to the wikimedia foundation. Commercial groups
could make products that use the content such as a Book on Cats, or a CD
version of Wikipedia, etc.
The only restriction would be those seeking to profit from a specific work
(or small group of works) of art. And since selling the individual art IN NO
WAY supports the mission of WMF, this restriction does us no harm.
For example, I can imagine someone who sells prints (or a photographer that
works for a newspaper) being willing to grant the community a license to use
their works to illustrate an appropriate subject while still retaining the
right to be the sole provider of the work of art to other newspaper or for
t-shirts or other consumer products that are made up of solely (or
substantially) the donated work.
Similarly, stock photo sellers might be willing to license some unique
photos to the community if they knew that someone couldn't setup a
compteting business using their stock photos from commons.
*ANOTHER ADVANTAGE - Can replace Fair Use in some cases*
This would also be a way that large organizations which own valuable photos
that have historic significance (such as AP or UPI in the US) could grant
the community a license to use the work without losing control of the photo.
Thus the community would then have permission (a license) to use the work
and would no longer have to justify the use of the work under Fair Use for
each individual language/jurisdiction. The organizations (and individual
artists) who want to support our mission could do so without significantly
undermining the value of their art.
--
Jim (trodel(a)gmail.com)
"Our love may not always be reciprocated, or
even appreciated, but love is never wasted"
- Neal A Maxwell-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Contact_us/Article_problem/Factual_e…
I posted about this to both these lists and have had no replies or
comment whatsoever so far.
So unless someone comes up with really convincing reasons not to push
this as the place to send companies with article concerns - and I mean
as in, sending out a press release - then that's precisely what's
going to happen.
In particular, are there any OTRS volunteers who can tell me if that's
the best way to raise a substantial legal concern about something on
en:wp?
- d.
Hello,
(I´m new to this emaillist so please forgive any mistakes I make.)
I´m the press contact for the Swedish Wikipedia (
http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anv%C3%A4ndare:Hannibal). Recently I was
contacted by a journalist who pointed out a fairly new wiki called
Metapedia, at http://www.metapedia.se, which was founded by a known racist
and leader of a small nationalistic (and antidemocratic) party in Sweden (I
can give several newspaper articles to back up that claim.). I checked it
out and discovered several things:
1. It used MediaWiki and thus look *very* similiar to Wikipedia. Even their
logo is in the same colour range. One could easily mistake one for the
other. This is one spinoff effect of the free MediaWiki, and probably one we
will see again. But the site uses the same phrases as svwiki, such as
Läsvärd artikel (featured article) and so on.
2. It has around 1300 articles, but the majority is about either a) people
connected to nazism, holocaust denial or critics of the Jewish conspiracy
(and their works), or b) their opponents, often citing them as Jewish or any
other race they might belong to, see for example
http://www.metapedia.se/index.php?title=Ernst_Klein&oldid=9247. They do not
appear to have any NPOV policy, and indeed claim to be a "metapolitical"
encyclopedia. A quote from their users' portal instead urges writers to
"make an effort to use an unbiased and low-key language. To avoid powerful
words and hard points of view is critical for being credible. Look at other
encyclopidias to get an idea how the texts should look stylistically" (My
translation of
http://www.metapedia.se/index.php?title=Metapedia:Deltagarportalen) This
seems to indicate that the appearence of NPOV is more important than actual
NPOV.
3. Their articles are often copied and edited versions of the svwiki
counterparts, with apparent POV-slant in their favour. But they have been
very careful not to give their game away. Their article on Hitler for
example is very short: ("Adolf Hitler, born April 20th 1889, deceased April
30th 1945. Known as among other things as the leader of the NSDAP party and
Reichschancellor for the German state during 1933-1945. Author of Mein
Kampf, one of the best selling books in the world." (my translation of
http://www.metapedia.se/index.php?title=Adolf_Hitler&oldid=5332) Compare
this to svwiki's
http://sv.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Adolf_Hitler&oldid=3639920). Not
particularly the absence of any mention of genocide or his part in WWII.
Since Wikipedia is GFDL they could easily have borrowed that article. (But I
guess it didn´t suit their purposes.)
4. They have given the licence *both* as GFDL *and* have what in Swedish is
called "ansvarig utgivare" (roughly "legally responsible publisher"). Does
this makes sense? Also, they have not given the full text of the
GFDL-licence. Don´t you have to do that?
5. Right now Metapedia have around 1.300 articles. This is to be measured
against svwikis more than 200.000 articles. This does not appear to make any
kind of threat, but why wait until every other search on Google has a
Metapedia hit on second place (after Wikipedia, of course)? A random Google
user probably can't be expected to know that Metapedia is run by people who
claim that millions of Jews *didn't die* in the concentration camps.
Worth noting is also that they have a Danish version since December 3rd
2006. The Swedish version has been online since August 3rd 2006.
My question is how to handle this. Can we do anything else beside complain
and try to outdo Metapedia by being sooo much better? Unfortunally, I
suspect that this may be the price of free software and free content, but
shouldn't Wikipedia be able to protect its reputation somehow? The
journalist who called me seemed to hold Wikipedia in high esteem and seemed
also to want to know what would be our reaction to this "evil twin"-version
of Wikipedia. I hope you can help me with your opinion.
I await your answers.
Best regards,
Lennart, aka Hannibal
