Hello,
Birgitte SB wrote:
The WMF licensing policy puts the burden on being able to declare a work to be "free content" or else use an EDP. Unless something is *really* old you have to know who held the copyright in order to show that their rights have expired. Not being able to determine the copyright holder, or even being able to prove the copyright holder is 100% unknown and always was, does not release the work into the Public Domain. Orphaned works are still copyrighted in the US. There is no provision for a work to be declared "free content" unless it a) released under a free license or b) in the Public Domain. *Many* works do not fit either of those criteria and still have 0% chance of anyone being awarded damages for copyright infringement.
But we are limited by the WMF licensing resolustion, which has a very high standard for "free content" and what is allowed to be hosted as such on WMF servers. I don't particularly like the licensing resolution for a number of reasons, but we can't just ignore that it exists and decide use a different standard that is more appealing.
I think that this argument can be easily reversed. Copyright without a copyright holder is just nonsense, because only the copyright holder can claim it. Nobody, not even the "State" or any public body, can do it on the holder's behalf. So I think that we should apply common sense, and allow images of which the copyright holder has disappeared in the mists of time.
Birgitte SB
Regards,
Yann