On 5/15/05, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote: [snip]
- Information presented on the Air Force Band of the Golden
West website is considered public information and may be distributed or copied. Use of appropriate byline/photo/image credits is requested.
If anyone thinks this general statement about 'information presented' somehow waives the copyrights of third parties, sorry but I call bullshit.
[snip]
Thanks, that was pretty much my position...
Now, what about the other contributions? For example... :) http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Wall_-_Little_Linda.ogg (by Jermy Wall of [[Spyro Gyra]] fame, afaik) http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Wilson_-_It_Mostly_Bees_that_Way_Sig... (at least we could ask the author: http://www.berklee.edu/faculty/detail.php?id=484&type=last_name&valu...) http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Wyche_-_Alright%2C_Okay%2C_You_Win.o... (copyright 1955, no doubt that it's not PD) http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Zawinul_-_Mercy%2C_Mercy%2C_Mercy.og... (first recorded in 1966, written by [[Joe Zawinul]])
These are just the top couple of music contributions on the commons by Raulbot. I believe these (and many more) are clearly infringing. There are quite a few cases where the composers are alive, and we might be able to get permission, but it is likely they do not own the rights to these works themselves.
Then we must consider the works which are old enough to potentially be in the public domain but were almost certainly performed from modern score. If we were to remove everything that was probably infringing under this criteria, we would likely be left with very little music. Would it be appropriate to add an additional tag for material which we are sure is completely unencumbered ?(i.e. it's an original work, or we can confirm it was performed from a public domain score. It would be ideal if we could also link to the public domain score, as a defense against a claim, and as an additional valuable resource for our users?). My concern here is that although at the wikimedia we might be willing to accept the risk of violation, it would be unfair to pass this risk to others without warning... It would be nice if Linux distributions could source multimedia content from the commons without taking on a substantial rights-checking burden.