Hoi,
You must have been living under a rock to have missed the concept of a
doctrine by the board that will disallow many licenses and practices. NC and
ND will be explicitly prohibited. Fair use will only be possible when a
community accepts an EDP or Exemption Doctrine Program. The EDP will even
need to be ratified by legal council ..
Images without information about copyright or license (Public Domain does
not have a license) will be disallowed.
Thanks,
GerardM
On 3/1/07, Anthony <wikilegal(a)inbox.org> wrote:
On 2/28/07, Yonatan Horan <yonatanh(a)gmail.com> wrote:
This reminds me of an idea I had that might not
be feasible. Make a
commons-like project for fair use pictures that all wikipedias can use
and
disable local uploads at all wikipedias. That
way, only absolutely must
fair
use pictures will be accepted (logos, stamps,
pictures of historical
events
that are unreplaceable, etc.) and there won't
be fair use pictures of
living
people and of other things for which fair use
isn't a must. That way you
won't have all the inconsistencies with, for example, Spanish Wikipedia
users asking why en can use fair use pictures of, say, music albums
while
they can't because they have local uploading
disabled and only upload to
commons. This way you'd also get people who are knowledgeable in the
area of
fair use and policies regarding fair use on
wikipedia taking care of
pictures rather than different people having different views on
different
projects. This way you'd also have one
central fair use policy that is
consistent amongst all the projects which will take care of the whining
as I
mentioned above and will also make sure that fair
use that isn't really
a
must isn't in use on other projects (from my
personal experience, this
is
what is going on on the Hebrew Wikipedia which
currently has, IMHO, the
most
lax fair use policies out of any other project).
Of course the problem
is
that you'd have to find people willing to
monitor such a project, which
you
might not find as readily available as people for
a project such as
commons
that deals with free content and there's also
the hassle of starting up
a
new project (which some may deem unnecessary).
-Yonatan
The much bigger problem is getting the key members of the various
projects to agree on a standard definition of what is and what isn't
acceptable. I don't see that happening any time soon, unless some
decision is made at the board level forcing the various projects to
adopt a certain standard.
IIRC, the board was opposed to making such a decision the last time it
was polled on such an idea. But I could be mistaken there.
An argument against even having a standard definition is that the
different language encyclopedias have very different communities of
users when it comes to what is legal and what isn't legal for them to
distribute without permission (in some cases there is an argument that
certain users wouldn't even be able to legally *contribute* to certain
articles). Once you've entered the realm of using unlicensed images
created in the last century or so you've taken the position that it's
OK to create an encyclopedia which some portion of your user-base
cannot legally distribute (and possibly contribute to). This is
acceptable, I think, but it relies on balancing the benefits and
drawbacks., and these benefits and drawbacks vary from community to
community. The English Wikipedia for example has a much greater
proportion of users who are able to use certain images than the French
Wikipedia, for example.
Anthony
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