Russavia,
I am aware that that is the issue (and I was talking about the original
problem images, not this letter). I'm a bit confused though about the
parody/satire angle, my understanding is that a CC licence does not
extinguish things such as moral rights that are not related to copyright.
Also, I do find it a bit odd that the Israeli Ministry of Justice would be
comfortable disclaiming any copyright to the image within Israel per their
letter, but would be uncomfortable licencing them in other jurisdictions
under a licence that does essentially the same thing. We can but only ask,
and see what they say; if they say "no" for the reasons you outline then
nothing has been lost. I do agree that the Australian Commonwealth is
behind the curve as well here, but in my experience and with some
honourable exceptions, most federal bureaucrats still conflate these issues
with the unrelated matter of FOI law.
But, I guess what I'm trying to get at, is that if these images *are*
useful, a more productive course of action than arguing about it on a
mailing list would probably be to identify what steps can be taken in good
faith to move them from a disputed copyright situation to a situation where
everyone is comfortable that there are no problems with re-use. If all the
energy that had gone into these threads and the various tit-for-tat
nominations on Commons had gone into that instead, we'd probably already be
halfway there.
Cheers,
Craig
On 22 June 2014 20:26, Russavia <russavia.wikipedia(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Craig, et al
On Sun, Jun 22, 2014 at 5:56 PM, Craig Franklin
<cfranklin(a)halonetwork.net> wrote:
Pardon me if this has already been covered, but
as I understand it the
problem is not the legal status of the files in Israel, the problem is
with
the legal status of the files in the United
States, where the Israeli
Government may still have some copyright protections.
You are misunderstanding completely the issue. There is no evidence
that Israel has a PD exemption for such government works, as we see
for say, Russia,[1] which allows for letters such as this to exist on
Commons.[2]
It seems to me that rather than insisting that
the files are permitted to
remain, a more fruitful avenue might be to use WMIL's contacts with the
Israeli Government to licence these images anywhere where copyright might
still exist under a very free licence like CC-0. That way even if URAA
or
some future copyright shenanigans places these
images back under
copyright,
they're usable by anyone. This ought to
satisfy even the most dogmatic
Commons admin that the images are indeed free.
I have told someone that what needs to occur is for the GPO to release
their claims over copyright worldwide in relation to URAA. The reason
for this, is the same reason that the Israeli Government would NEVER
CC-0 licence their materials -- because it opens them up to parody,
satire and other uses that they might not agree with -- and we need to
protect re-users who wish to use materials for such purposes. That's
the same reason that the Australian Commonwealth Parliament refuses to
CC photos of MPs, in case you weren't aware.
Cheers
Russavia
[1]
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:PD-RU-exempt
[2]
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Russian_letter_to_FIFA.jpg