On Sun, Mar 2, 2014 at 8:50 PM, Chris McKenna cmckenna@sucs.org wrote:
You've missed the point. Commons is not at present a reliable source of media, Free or otherwise, because media gets deleted because once someone alleges that it is not free it gets deleted if the original uploader cannot prove it is free, regardless of the merits of the allegation.
That's an odd view of "the merits". The content should not really have been uploaded to begin with if the uploader couldn't show it was free. Commons has help desks to assist people who are unsure.
The Foundation has said "do not delete images that *might* be unfree under URAA unless there is a takedown notice" yet the images continue to be deleted.
I would take that complaint more seriously if people had identified deletions where the URAA status was not entirely clear, and complained about them. Instead the current proposal is that *all* URAA-related deletions would be overturned.
The Foundation has not changed its position (expressed two years ago) that images which are clearly unfree under URAA should be deleted.
This is entirely irrelevant to the attitude at Commons. English Wikipedia
is Free according to the definition it uses, which is essentally "Free for practical purposes as an Encyclopaedia" and that is applied reliably. In contrast, Commons is arbitrarily and inconsistently Free and appears to be prioritising point making over being a practical media repository. You are free to disagree about en.wp's choices, but this does not excuse the attitude of Commons to the Wikimedia community.
Modify that to "Free for practical purposes *in the USA* as an Encyclopaedia", and you're getting closer. Commons should have a broader goal than that, though.
Getting back to URAA-affected images, [[en:Template:Not-PD-US-URAA]] places images in [[en:Category:Works copyrighted in the United States]], which says "we are currently trying to figure out what to do with files like this one." It's more than two years since Golan vs Holder, which seems a long time to be figuring this out.
That's fair enough in a way, since image hosting probably shouldn't be high on enwiki's list of priorities. But contrast that with Commons, where the essential decisions regarding URAA were made (based partly on WMF Legal input) within 6 months or so, and substantial progress has been made towards implementing them, despite the much larger scale of the problem there (several thousand images, compared to 127 in [[en:Category:Works copyrighted in the United States]]).