2010/2/19 David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com:
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Florence Devouard Anthere9@yahoo.com Date: 19 February 2010 21:19 Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Please HELP save Wikipedia history ! (urgent) To: wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
An editor on META is having the crazy idea of tagging all historical logo propositions made during the Wikipedia logo contest back in 2003 with a template
"This image has no license information attached to it. This means that it has an unknown copyright status. Unless the copyright status is provided and a license is given, the image will be deleted one week after this template was added."
Example:http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:EloquenceSunflowerBlue-Small.png
Please help save Wikipedia history and weight in to avoid all those images being deleted. We are reaching the limits of non sense.
Yes...Copyright paranoia in action... You can always copy those files as long as they exists and simply create your private website with all of them. I wonder who is going to sue you for copyvio in such the case. I guess nobody...
Anyway this is indeed big question if we should delete files based on the "0 tolerance for potential copyvio, no matter if it does make any practical sense or was examine but someone with real copyright knowledge" rule or rather based on "is there any probability that someone will sue us for copyvio". Wikimedia Commons (and many other Wikimedia projects) currently follow the "0 tolerance" approach. The exeption is still Wikipedia-en and several other projects which still allow fair-use.