These are excellent points raised by Michael Maggs. The bit about non-commercial licenses in particular. That has always been difficult to explain to people who are quite happy for Wikipedia to use their images or images of their works, but don't want people to profit commercially from those images or their works.
It can be hard to explain that Wikipedia is free ('gratis'), but we want people to be able to reuse and repackage the material (including images) and create commercial products from them. Some people quite rightly back away from that when they realise what they would be allowing people to do with the images.
Freedom of panorama (or rather, lack of it) has particularly unfortunate effects, in that people who are unaware of these provisions think they can upload their photography to Commons and are then very often discouraged and de-motivated when they are told that the images they contributed will be deleted. It is this motivational aspect that I think is overlooked by those who want to encourage people to contribute to Wikipedia and Commons and other Wikimedia projects. My feeling is that vast numbers of potential and current contributors decide Wikipedia is not for them when this happens, and they walk away and we lose out when that happens.
The effect is magnified when this happens to photos that have been *used with no problems for many years*. Potentially photos that people uploaded to Commons many years ago may get retrospectively deleted. If this does run into the tens and hundreds of thousands, the motivational effect on those who uploaded pictures or use them to illustrate their articles, could be immense.
If these changes take effect (and that is a big if) and if Commons (as seems likely) goes on a big deletion spree, then the practical effect is likely to be to discourage large numbers of (in some cases) highly active contributors to the point where they may even cease contributing. That is something that should be considered, IMO.
Can anyone here think of any way to mitigate the impact on people who may not understand why their images are being deleted, if it does come to that eventually?
Carcharoth
On 6/22/15, Michael Maggs Michael@maggs.name wrote:
This has been mentioned before by Dimi, but bears repeating.
While we may all think it's *outrageous* that tens of thousands of images may have to be deleted from Commons, we do have to make sure we have messages that will resonate with those who don't agree with us or who don't care. If our only message is that open content will be harmed, we have no answer to those who reply 'so what?'
In countries such as France and Belgium, that currently have no Freedom of Panorama, we need to address arguments like these:
- Why should people be allowed to make money by using an architect's
intellectual property without permission? 2. Why does Wikipedia, a hobbyist website, think it's OK to steal other people's rights? 3. Non-commercial use won't be affected, so this is not an issue of freedom at all. It just stops people making money from someone else's creative work. 4. If Wikipedia holds itself out as non-commercial, it can and should accept non-commercial licences. The argument that 'images will have to be deleted' is based on your private internal rule which could easily be changed.
Remember that in some countries there is a long history of supporting rights holders, that millions of people don't know what 'open' means, don't care, and won't be persuadable by any sort of argument based on freedom to view. To them, freedom of panorama is just a way of illicitly taking away an artist's right to protect his or her own creative work.
Probably most of us reading this will say that these arguments hold no water, but we need to tackle them head-on.
Michael
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