--- Yann Forget yann@forget-me.net wrote:
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.
I agree that that such a reversed approach to the issue *could* be made. However that is not the approach WMF took with the licensing resolution.
Copyright without a copyright holder may seem nonsense, but it is an acknowledged part of copyright law. [1] I find alot of copyright law to be short-sighted and in the end to not make much sense. Personally I wish that the WMF would revist the resolution and particularly look into the incorporation of existing works into the projects, rather than only focusing on the new works being created by the projects. But right now it is what it is.
Birgitte SB
[1] http://www.copyright.gov/orphan/orphan-report.pdf
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