Forwarding to foundation-l, I forgot it the first time.
--- On Thu, 21/8/08, Patricia Rodrigues <snooze210904(a)yahoo.se> wrote:
From: Patricia Rodrigues <snooze210904(a)yahoo.se>
Subject: Re: [Commons-l] [Foundation-l] PD-art and official "position of the
WMF"
To: "Wikimedia Commons Discussion List" <commons-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Date: Thursday, 21 August, 2008, 5:55 PM
Dear everyone,
According to the Wikimedia Foundation's values
(
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Values), "An essential part of the Wikimedia
Foundation's mission is encouraging the development of free-content educational
resources that may be created, used, and reused by the entire human community. We believe
that this mission requires thriving open formats and open standards on the web to allow
the creation of content not subject to restrictions on creation, use, and reuse."
Indeed, one of the milestones achieved by Wikimedia was the approval of the resolution
about licensing policy across projects
(
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Licensing_policy), setting up restrictions
about how EDPs are to be implemented, and which legislations should be respected when
writing up such EDPs. This is appliable to all projects except Commons,
which is expressively forbidden to have such a thing as an EDP - because EDPs are for
non-free content, and Wikimedia Commons is supposed to host only free content (free
defined as in
http://freedomdefined.org/Definition).
In practice, things are a little bit different. Projects here and there have been setting
up EDPs, and although there is no visible record of this (as far as I know), hopefully all
these EDPs have been set up in accordance to this licensing resolution. I do not if such
is supervised, but that is not really what I'd like to talk about today.
What I hopefully can point out today is that Commons is also not complying to the Four
Freedoms, in light of its own licensing policy, which is the centerpiece of the project
(
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Licensing). We have several inconsistencies in
our "subpolicies", but the biggest one has just been introduced: the
modification to {{PD-Art}} that has been the topic
for this thread. The new wording on this template reflects a position of the community in
light of opinions/positions of WMF staff members, and goes to the point of considering
this an official position of the WMF.
So if you don't mind, I'd like to pose some questions:
*Is the official position of the WMF to consider only US copyright in what concerns
content to be hosted in any Wikimedia project?
**If the answer is yes, is Commons included?
**If the answer is no, which copyrights should we consider to host content? Please specify
the situation for Wikimedia Commons too.
*Is any WMF staff member entitled to give a "position" in behalf of the Board in
a way that condones (even incites?) breaking the law outside of the US, in the sake of
lobbying for Free Content/Licensing?
*Are the positions/opinions given by Erik and Mike to be considered for the National
Portrait Gallery/UK copyright law only, or for any legislation that has
similar/equivalent problems, such as the Swedish one?
*Finally: if we are to consider US copyright only in this specific (PD-Art) matter, but
non-US admins are required by some authority in their own country to take down any media
that is copyrighted in that country, should admins defy the local authorities or the new
Commons licensing?
I believe that if we start allowing exceptions of this kind, Commons does not fulfill its
role as a media repository that is indeed free to reuse, and its existence is not making
much sense. So I would like to know what is the future of this project, and whether it is
more feasible to have local uploads everywhere else, tightly regulated with a legislation,
whichever that may be, instead of a central repository of "more or less free stuff,
it sort of depends, you know".
Thank you for your time.
PatrĂcia Rodrigues
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