It looks to me like Harald Bischoff is making Money with this. If you google his Name, you find a lot of Blogposts related his "Abmahnungen [1]".

According to jurablogs he is also sending such "Abmahnungen" when a link to the license text itself is missing [2].

Bischoff is sending the Abmahnungen though an Attorney which is asking the affected persons to sign a cease and desist letter. Apart from that the affected person is requested to pay for damages and attorneys fees[2].

The complains are all over the web, this is imho a very bad reputation for wiki(p/m)edia. I am wondering if his behavior is violating the terms of use.

Regards, Steinsplitter

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abmahnung [2] http://www.jurablogs.com/2015/04/28/abmahnung-wegen-unberechtigter-bildnutzu... [3] https://www.betterplace.org/de/fundraising-events/freiheitsliebe-abmahnung-d...

On Mon, Jul 20, 2015 at 10:07 AM, rupert THURNER <rupert.thurner at gmail.com> wrote:

hi,

may i propose to fix the attribution problem for the one common use case "do it like wikipedia does". somebody who refers to images from commons like wikipedia does it should be on legal safe grounds.

there is a recent incident of non-wiki-love where user harald bischoff states "comes into situations where pictures for the WMF are created", here:

https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Benutzer:Haraldbischoff&diff=... "komme ich regelmässig in Situationen in denen auch das eine oder andere Foto für die wikimedia-foundation"

harald bischoff then uploads these pictures with cc-by-sa-3.0 license, and sues users who use such fotos. the complaint here from a blogger who paid 900 euro, who used a foto, with backlink to commons, and attributing in mouseover:

http://diefreiheitsliebe.de/politik/in-eigener-sache-fast-900-euro-verlust-d...

what i would really love to see is that wikipedia is the role model, i.e. wikipedia refers the pictures as they should be referred by any website. the distinction "because wikipedia is owned by wmf we refer differently to commons than anybody else" needs to go away imo. be it only for the educational effect. personally i do not understand why a link to the works is not good enough as attribution. i thought cc-by-sa 4.0 fixes this problem anyway?

to summarize, i propose to legalize the use case "do it as wikipedia does" when attributing images. to make the site look good anyway we should either fix the software, or the license.

best, rupert

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