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]
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