This is a great mail to receive, thanks for your work, Kat.
On 08/02/07, Kat Walsh kwalsh@wikimedia.org wrote:
Since individual projects have differing community standards and there are potentially legal issues in different jurisdictions, individual projects may choose to be more restrictive than Foundation policy requires, such as the many projects that do not allow "fair use" media at all. However, no project may have content policies less restricive, or that allow licenses other than those allowed on Wikimedia Commons and limited fair use.
There have been some recent deletion debates on Common, primarily concerning "country-specific" PD tags, which might require further comment on this point. (see below)
Also, the wording here implies that "Foundation policy" can be equated with "licenses allowed on Wikimedia Commons". One one hand, the WMF is unlikely to want to start handing out an explicit list of acceptable licenses, so that is understandable. But on the other it means that the nuances of Foundation policy are being decided on one wiki and having conseuqences for all wikis. Correct me if I'm wrong but this is the first time this happens, I think. If this is correct, will the WMF be supplying some legal assistance from time to time for Commons? (such as the cases that follow)
Note: these debates were unsurprisingly quite heated, but they are closed for now, and I would appreciate it if we could avoid re-hashing the debate here.
1. First case is PD-Italy, which was deleted. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:PD-Italy http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/Template:PD-Ital...
I believe that IT.wp chose to upload many of the Commons PD-Italy images locally. Please see the wording on their template: http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:PD-Italia
At the time I think we all thought this was an OK solution, since the laws are not easy to interpret, and each project (Commons and IT.wp) was just making the best interpretation they could.
Given your above statement, is this in fact acceptable or not?
2. Another big case was PD-Soviet. (it now RDRs to {{copyvio}}) http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/Template:PD-Sovi...
Lots and lots of discussion about this one: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template_talk:PD-Soviet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template_talk:PD-USSR
It appears to me that RU.wp chose to follow the Commons' solution and depreciate the template, rather than upload files locally. See http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A8%D0%B0%D0%B1%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%BD:PD-Soviet (PD-old and PD-Russia are both accepted on Commons) I am not sure if other Wikipedias depreciated the template or uploaded locally.
3. German logos. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Logo-Germany DE.wp has a lot of logos tagged as "PD-ineligible" which American or British readers would be baffled to believe. (Probably other jurisdictions too. These are only two that I know for sure, do not treat logos in the German way.) http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/Template:Logo-Ge...
Trademarks have always been a very hairy case for Commons. We choose to follow a stricter interpretation than DE.wp, but I think it is a big enough wiki with enough sensible people that their interpretation is probably correct for Germany. So they are being "less restrictive" than Commons, but is that OK or not?
regards, Brianna user:pfctdayelise