On Thu, Jan 14, 2010 at 1:24 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote:
2010/1/13 private musings
<thepmaccount(a)gmail.com>om>:
G'day all,
I continue to have concerns related to the growing number of explicit images
on WMF projects (largely commons) - but rather than banging on with dull
mailing list posts which gaurantee a chorus of groans, I'm trying to be a
bit less dull, and have made a short video presentation.
It's my intention to work on this with a few like minded wiki volunteers,
and probably then make a sort of alternate version for youtube etc. to see
what the general feeling is out there.... what I'd really like is for the
foundation to acknowledge that this is an issue where some regulation may be
necessary (or indeed, where the discussion of potential benefits of some
regulation is even conceivable) - I hope the board, or the advisory board,
might also be interested in offering some thoughts / recommendations too.
I've used a selection of explicit images from Commons, so please only click
through if you're over the age of majority;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Privatemusings/WikiPr0n
ps. I'm also particularly interested if anyone can point me to where
'section 2257' (record keeping) issues may have previously been discussed -
is it the current foundation position that section 230 acts as an exemption
to these requirements?
Come on, even *I* would have given up on this argument by now...
you're not going to win... If you think there are legal concerns,
email Mike Godwin.
Part of the problem is that people who think they understand the whole
of the argument being made actually don't. Arguments against
censorship address only a part of the concerns Privatemusings and
others, including myself, have expressed. PM's comment above referring
to Section 2257 alludes to much of the rest of the concerns -
specifically, the rights of the individuals featured in the
photographs themselves. There are ~25,000 images in the Commons
category of potential personality rights problems, but the Commons
policy (COM:PEOPLE) essentially leaves it to the ethical discretion
(and nose for appropriate sounding file names) of the uploader to
manage rights issues.
Attempts to address this problem are sporadic - an example is a group
of over a hundred images from a Dutch photographer with a checkered
past, whose work has been largely removed from Flickr (from where it
was imported to Commons). After quite a lot of debate and delay, many
of these images were deleted on Commons in 2008 - but since then, many
new ones have been uploaded.
To avoid the very real chance that the subjects of explicit photos are
underage or have not given publishing consent, I would like to see
Commons require proof of model release, and age verification, for
explicit images.
Nathan