Tim Starling wrote:
Mark Clements wrote:
"Bogdan Giusca" <liste(a)dapyx.com>
wrote in
message news:1996630170.20070206155017@dapyx.com...
http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%99%D0%B8%D1%84%D1%84
Any ru.wiki admin here willing to delete those images?
BTW, how come some Wikipedias from countries without a fairuse clause
in their copyright laws use such images?
As far as I am aware (IANAL), because the servers are in Florida, US law
applies to all WPs regardless of language.
Who cares where the servers are? Wikipedia should be distributable
throughout the world, including reuse and publication.
Fair use is allowed everywhere, there's just some contention on what
qualifies as "fair". There's also some variation in terminology: the Berne
Convention calls it fair practice, and it's known as fair dealing in
English common law. The tests for fair use in the US are somewhat more
inclusive than elsewhere. It remains to be seen whether a result like
Perfect 10 v. Google will be reproduced in courts throughout the world.
World wide redistributability still needs to be tempered with
practicality and common sense. The extra long terms in Mexico and
Colombia should not leave the rest of paralyzed to the point of
inactivity. The situation would be even worse if some small
impoverished country were to accept payment from a large corporate
purveyor of proprietary material to institute a regime of perpetual
copyrights. The location of the servers is important in determining
jurisdiction in the event of any potential difference of opinion over
whether we collectively can include the material. How the downstream
user emplys the material is beyond our control, and it is iimpossible to
imagine all the possibilities, among which are those that would succeed
in converting free material into non-free material. That is entirely
possible unles we were to actively pursue anyone and everyone who claims
copyright on material thawt was already GFDL.
Some amount of fair use is inevitable, and just how much needs to be
flexible enough to accomodate a myriad possibilities. It would be a
dangerous practice for those of us who do not participate in a project
in a particular language to start making assumptions about the
applicability of the law of the country where that language dominates.
Thus far some language projects are comfortable with fair use; others
aren't. In this case it is up to the participants of WP:RU collectively
to determine their comfort level. The normal good-faith assumption is
that contributors do so in compliance with the law, and failing that
that their breaches of the law are not wilfull. Naturally, if WMF
receives formal complaints it will need to scrutinize the situation more
closely, and act accordingly, but that does not seem to be the case.
After reading about the Perfect 10 case I think that it is easy to
distinguish it from the present complaint. While Google was going out
and adding thumbnails of anything its spiders could discover, our
article includes a few illustrations which in the editors' exercise of
judgement fairly illustrated the article. Allowance is already made for
that kind of thing in English. It should be up to our Russian editors
to determine if they want a similar policy, and not for outsiders to
impose their interpretation of Russian law.
The other factor here is whether Bogdan's complaint is really about a
copyvio, or is it about pornography. In the past we have tended to be
more tolerant of pornography than copyright infringement. I become
concerned when an allegation of copyright infringement is used
tactically to achieve a removal of supposed pornography.
Ec