On 8 June 2014 12:21, matanya matanya@foss.co.il wrote:
Hello,
Commons licensing policy determines media should be free in source country and in US. I want to propose We change the policy to be: "free in source country" only, and to cope with US laws where the servers are hosted found a "DMCA take down notice" Team in OTRS, that will handle requests to remove Items that are non-free in the US after verifying proper grounds for the claim.
This approach to copyright will prevent issues like URAA issues, shorter term issues and restored copyright issues.
It will enrich commons with many files that are FREE (mostly PD) in source country, but not on commons due to US laws. Unless the copyright holder (mostly Gov's and archives) will not request removal, and they won't since they released the media, we will be using those files.
I'm not a lawyer, so I probably missed most of the legal implication, But I do volunteer to found and lead the team, if this idea is accepted and commons community would want this policy change. I'm seeking input from copyright experienced users and lawyers, before i start an official policy change on commons.
Thanks
Matanya Moses
Hi Matanya,
From your history on Commons, I am sure you know as well as I, where
to make a proposal on the project and that this list is not a good place to start an educational/lobbying campaign.
Michael Maggs' proposal in this area seems to have got stuck in quicksand and dried up. To be honest, as an experienced Commons contributor, I would tend to avoid helping with yet another URAA based proposal/bun fight, unless there was a groundswell of opinion in favour of change; it just is not a good investment of volunteer time. Despite your recent comments on Commons, I don't see it happening.
In the long term, if you want to shift this reluctant elephant, I suggest you concentrate on specific project areas (like early Japanese public domain film posters...) and build those up into an excellent case book. Nobody has even tried building their case book up using the differing PD licence interpretation on the English Wikipedia yet. This at least would have the advantage that anyone could see exciting educational images that were not on Commons but could see (and use) images on Wikipedia, and this might motivate them to review and have an opinion on this contentious area of how we interpret and apply international copyright law.
Please remember that 95%+ of Commons contributors are not going to bother even attempting to understand the URAA, DMCA etc. Keeping it simple and easy to understand in a multilingual environment is essential.
Fae