Dear Wikimedians,

I would like to introduce you all to Thomas, a fourth year law student at the National Law University Jodhpur. He has joined CIS-A2K as an intern and will be developing a primer on Copyright and Creative Commons for the use of Indian Wikimedians.

Thomas' aim is to cater to the broad spectrum of Wikimedia users and to provide both an introduction to copyright law and to address more advanced questions of copyright law that users might encounter with regards to issues like digitisation, public domain works, etc.

His approach thus far has been to comb the India Mailing List to discover the common questions or concerns that Indian Wikimedians face while dealing with content. He hopes to then transpose answers to these queries along with general copyright related information onto a primer following a mixture of a FAQ based and prose based format to allow for better transposition of information as well as to allow for better readability and engagement.

As you will realise, this approach suffers from a number of defects:
1. There are a large number of queries or concerns that users might have which are not addressed onto the mailing lists and are near impossible to pre-empt.
2. There are a number of unique processes that Wikimedia implements (like the “precautionary principle”) that is unique to the context of copyright and Wikimedia which he is yet to familiarise himself and such a familiarity can only be built with periodic use.
3. There are a large number of Wikimedians who might be unrepresented on the Mailing List and might have queries regarding the use of content.


To this end, Thomas hopes to get some support from the community here in terms of:
1. Asking any queries that you may have regarding copyright law and its application to the Wikimedia Universe.
2. Passing along any queries or issues that you may have heard of from other users, so that this may be introduced.
3. Passing along any other information that may be specifically relevant to this endeavour, in terms of experience with Wikimedia policy, practice that has been developed over the past few years and the like.

Any support in this regard would be extremely helpful. This primer will of course be a work in progress for subsequent authors to edit and build upon, true to the Wikimedia ethos, however for the sake of at least an initial completeness, I request you to reply in over the course of this week, latest by the 3rd of January 2015. You can reach Thomas at thomasjv93{at} gmail.com or on his EN Wikipedia User Talk page:Thomasjv93 He is copied on this e-mail.

It would be useful if you could post this message on your respective Wikimedia project's village pump.

Thank you for your support.

Best,
Vishnu