Poking around I found the following related discussions listed below (all
in German) dealing with the current issue and a similar 2013 complaint. In
the second link Harald responds a couple times to the 2013 complaint. The
Google translate versions of the linked discussions are somewhat hard to
follow so I'll leave it to someone with a native understanding to
summarize. As far as I can tell no one has raised the current issue on his
talk page (either at DE or Commons).
It is also worth noting that Harald has about 800 photos on Commons, mostly
of athletes or minor celebrities. Spot checking a couple dozen suggests
that the majority of his photos are unused, but at least a small fraction
are widely used across many Wikipedias.
Current German Wikipedia Discussion:
-Robert Rohde
On Mon, Jul 20, 2015 at 7:56 PM, Newyorkbrad <newyorkbrad(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I would have a serious problem with someone
litigating, or threatening to
litigate, over an instance of technical non-compliance with the license
terms; much less so if the (alleged) infringer persisted in republishing
without requested attribution information after warnings.
Has anyone directly contacted Mr. Bischoff and asked him what he is doing
and why?
Regards,
Newyorkbrad
On Monday, July 20, 2015, Robert Rohde <rarohde(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Mon, Jul 20, 2015 at 5:46 PM, Brad Jorsch
(Anomie) <
bjorsch(a)wikimedia.org
wrote:
<snip>
> Since when has that ever been a thing? With respect to licenses such as
CC,
we follow
the same rules as anyone else.
Not really. Commons actually recommends that an explicit credit line
accompany CC BY images, which is something that Wikipedia doesn't do in
articles. See below.
If the description here is accurate, it sounds to
me like this harald
bischoff should be blocked and possibly have his files deleted as
incorrectly licensed (since he apparently doesn't accept the usual
interpretation of CC BY), unless he publicly renounces the behavior of
suing reusers. But I'll leave that to Commons and dewiki to work out.
Commons' own guidance to reusers [1][2][3] recommends including an
explicit
credit line alongside CC BY images, e.g.
"You must attribute the work to the author(s), and when re-using the work
or distributing it, you must mention the license terms or a link to
them..."
"[R]eusers must attribute the work by providing a credit line"
And recommends credit lines of the form: "John Doe / CC-BY-SA-3.0", with
an included link to the license.
As I understand it, Harald sent a demand letter to a reuser who failed to
mention his name and the license. In other words, he demanded
compensation
from a reuser who failed to do precisely the
things that Commons actually
says that CC BY image reusers are supposed to do. While I agree that
Harald's actions are not friendly, it is also hard for me to get behind
the
notion of punishing someone for demanding that
reusers due the things
that
Commons actually recommends that they do. His
behavior is either A) a
mean-spirited attempt to extract money from unexpecting people by
fighting
against the spirit of the license, or B) a
vigorous defense of his rights
under the license. And I'm not really sure which. Suppose,
hypothetically, that Harald actually sued someone (as opposed to just
sending demand letters) and the courts actually agreed that the 3.0
license
requires that reusers provide a credit line (not
an impossible outcome).
Would that change how we viewed his behavior?
CC BY 4.0 explicitly says that a link to a page with attribution and
license terms is sufficient, but prior to 4.0 it isn't clear whether such
a
link actually compiles with the license. There
has been enough recurring
doubt over the issue that CC decided to explicitly address the linking
issue in the 4.0 version. Wikipedia behaves as if merely linking to an
attribution page is always okay, but Commons' advice to reusers seems to
be
written with the perspective that it might not
be. (I don't know the
history of the Commons pages, so I'm not really sure of the community's
thinking here.)
I do think there is something of a problem that Wikipedia models a
behavior
(i.e. linking) that is different from what
Commons recommends (i.e.
credit
lines).
-Robert Rohde
[1]
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Reusing_content_outside_Wikimedia
[2]
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Reusing_content_outside_Wikimedi…
[3]
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Credit_line
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