On 12/11/14, 8:14 PM, Andre Engels wrote:
On Thu, Dec 11, 2014 at 6:21 PM, Russavia
<russavia.wikipedia(a)gmail.com> wrote:
To answer the tractor question first. Of course
not, there is nothing
copyrightable in this image.
I see many copyrightable objects in this image. The
tractor. The car.
The logo. The boards with demonstration slogans. The clothes. The
gate. Anything that has some kind of creative design is copyrighted.
Which just goes to show "nothing copyrighted" is not a workable way to
set our limits.
That's true. I think we do need some attempt at workable limits which
try to avoid pushing too hard on fair use that essentially only
qualifies Wikipedia-like entities, but also avoids deleting files that
are exceedingly unlikely to result in a successful copyright suit.
I'd take the pragmatic justification for being copyright-sticklers on
Commons to be: so we can provide a free-media repository that our
reusers can use, even commercially and world-wide, in the reasonably
secure belief that their reuse is legal, because this is truly freely
licensed media.
How does one go about trying to fulfill that goal? I fear it *is*
actually a fairly high bar, because there are a lot of pitfalls in
copyright law through which a reuser may be successfully sued, if we are
too sloppy with what we allow into our "free media repository". But it's
certainly possible to also exclude things that have absolutely no chance
of being a problem. Which is in itself quite difficult to predict.
-Mark