On 18/06/2014, Peter Southwood <peter.southwood(a)telkomsa.net> wrote:
This is a strong argument for locating Uncommons
outside the USA. Somewhere
where the copyright laws allow the widest range of images to be kept. Images
can be tagged for where they are free and where they are not free.
I have now uploaded nearly 400,000 public domain and other freely
released images to Wikimedia Commons. Every week there are times I
break into a sweat wondering if one of the many institutions I have
taken the original images from, will attempt to prosecute me
personally under 'sweat of the brow', conflicting international law,
database rights, misuse of a website under a tacit contract, etc. Even
though I am careful to ensure I have made "reasonable efforts" to
ascertain that the images are free to reuse, mistakes happen and I am
subject to UK law, along with the long reach of US law and the
Wikimedia Foundation has made it clear that there is no guarantee that
any legal costs as a direct result of my volunteer work would be
covered by them.
Deliberately setting out to avoid copyright law and uploading material
to an aggregating website that you know for certain is "non-free" and
supplying it so that others may avoid copyright, is a far riskier
thing to do. If a civil action against a volunteer were taken, I doubt
there could be a defence in court based on "good faith" or "reasonable
effort".
I note that a WMF trustee has made a supportive comment in this
thread, however before Wikimedia starts officially encouraging and
promoting sharing non-free media using donated charitable funds
intended for free works, any "uncommons" proposal should be carefully
advised on by lawyers. At an individual level, I would recommend that
volunteers protect themselves with anonymity using technical means to
ensure their contributions were untraceable, so that only the website
host could ever be prosecuted in relevant jurisdictions. Note that
just because your server is in Peru, does not mean that works
protected under US or EU law may not be vigorously defended in local
courts. Legally, this may well be treated as an internet piracy
website, they tend to not end well.
Commons has 21,500,000 files, the unnecessary drama created
(literally) by a couple of admins who should be able to talk to each
other rather than wheel-warring, and then forum shopping, over some
works suffering under the consequences of the rather daft URAA,
represent a pin-drop in that ocean of freely reusable media. This does
not make Commons "tragic", indeed it feels like a mellow place 99% of
the time as nobody really notices the committed content contributors.
Links
*
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Statistics
*
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Staying_mellow
*
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WW#Wheel_war
Fae
--
faewik(a)gmail.com
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae