I have absolutely no idea what the potential legal issues you may face may be. However, I assume from your mail you already have a limited collection of images you have tagged as "fair use" (eg company logos). Unless you have lawyers or - at least - law students working on the project you might not be able to get good advice on how you should handle the issue and avoid problems.
My (purely personal) opinion is you should make an issue out of this before it becomes a problematic issue for the foundation. Approach organisations you've covered and used logos from under fair use and where coverage has been non-controversial. Discuss with groups like this how your local laws may be inappropriate for a totally free press *before* you're in conflict with them. It may not work with your legal system, but I'm not aware of any that doesn't take precedent and the like into account. If you have this history and someone who gets negative coverage decides to make an issue out of it you've already laid the groundwork to defeat their argument.
Brian McNeil
-----Original Message----- From: foundation-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:foundation-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Michal Zlatkovsky Sent: 19 December 2007 12:58 To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List Subject: [Foundation-l] Czech Wikipedia's EDP and WMF's licensing policy
Hello, after the Board approved the licensing policy (http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Licensing_policy in case anyone forgot :) ), we have written an EDP on Czech Wikipedia that allows us to use things like company logos under certain conditions (okay with US and Czech laws, ie. explicit permission needed; okay with GFDL, ie. can be nonderivative; no free image available; fair use-like rationale) and we've been using it for a while. However, I talked to pfctdayelise about our EDP today and her opinion is that the Foundation's licensing policy was targeted to "legal loopholes" like fair use or fair dealing - and as we don't have any such thing in the Czech Republic (and I'm pretty confident we don't, there have been numerous discussions about that), our EDP is invalid and we can't make any exception policy at all.
I think her interpretation is correct and we at Czech Wikipedia should revoke out EDP, but I'd like to hear more opinions, and as I don't expect any official reply, I'm trying this mailing list. So, what do you think? :)
Thanks, Michal Zlatkovsky, [[m:User:Timichal]]
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