I think bad faith uploaders should be banned from uploading images to Commons. A blog
which credited image taken from a Wikipedia article to Wikipedia is not as terrible as
reputable newspaper which uses images from Wikipedia and claimed ownership of the image
copyright. I think the copyright notice on some of the website is what triggered some of
this charges. Imagine a website which uses an image I upload to Wikipedia without proper
attribution and it's copyright notice reading "All contents on this website are
intellectual property of xyz....".
Best,
Isaac
Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless handheld from Glo Mobile.
-----Original Message-----
From: Gergő Tisza <gtisza(a)gmail.com>
Sender: "Wikimedia-l" <wikimedia-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org>Datet;Date: Sun,
5 Mar 2017 22:37:35
To: Wikimedia Mailing List<wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Reply-To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] a second commons,
prevent cease and desist business
On Sun, Mar 5, 2017 at 6:06 AM, Todd Allen <toddmallen(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I'm not a German speaker, and I know context and
nuance can be lost in
machine translation. That being said, the one about someone who was
offering attribution and then got slapped with a bill for a simple
technical error is very disturbing. Especially since as brought up before,
a direct link would always lack the attribution contained on an
accompanying page.
I can read some German and looked into a similar case the last time this
came up (the thread was called "harald bischoff advertising to make images
"for the wikimedia foundation" and then suing users"). It involved
(amongst
others) an amateur news blog which took an image from the Wikipedia article
of some politician and credited it to "Wikipedia" (with link to the image
description page; but no author or license), and was slapped with a ~$1000
fee. These kind of predatory tactics hurt the reputation and moral standing
of the movement IMO.
I think asking for damages might be acceptable if
- the reuser is a big organization which has its own copyright lawyers
(e.g. a commercial news publisher) and really should have known better
- the reuser refuses to fix the attribution when asked
- the reuser does not even attempt to indicate that the image is from
elsewhere
but when none of those is the case, threatening to sue violates the spirit
of free content, even if it is in accordance with the fine print of the
license.
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