Certain articles lend themselves to philatelic coverage, for example,
Stellaland, after all, most folks who have ever heard of Stellaland first
encountered it with respect to its stamps. Illustrations of a few
representative stamps could be added.
A complete stamp catalog might be going a bit far, but if the energy is
around, which I doubt, it could be a sister project, Wikistamps...
If you take a photograph or scan a postage stamp that image is not
copyrighted even though the underlying design may be. Sometimes a nice
image, for example of a butterfly or bird or even a person can be included
in Wikipedia in that way. The Japanese stamp you reference is just a
photograph or scan of a stamp which anyone can make and publish, although
perhaps, in Japan, there might be some restriction as it is a Japanese
stamp.
It occurs to me that there is a sort of disconnect here. If you take a
photograph of painting in an museum or someone's home that is copyright free
but if you scan a reproduction of a painting in a book it is not, yet there
is very little difference in what you have done.
Fred
From: Yann Forget <yann(a)forget-me.net>
Reply-To: wikipedia-l(a)Wikimedia.org
Date: Fri, 27 Aug 2004 14:19:33 +0200
To: wikipedia-l(a)Wikipedia.org
Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Stamps, wiki and copyright
Hi all,
In the discussion Wikispecies, there were a few mentions of the possibility to
enlarge Wikipedia with coverage on postage stamps.
While some articles on famous stamps may easily find their place in an
encyclopedia, an extensive coverage of stamps seems outside of the scope of
Wikipedia. So I would like to know what people think about that.
A few years back, I started a project on Savannah to offer data about postage
stamps under a free licence, but with no success. Maybe a wiki would be more
appriopriate. I have a MySQL database about French stamps to start with.
AFAIK, there are no other project to provide data about stamps are under a
free licence.
Articles about stamps obviously need an illustration with stamps scans and
photos. But it seems that most modern stamps can be considered as artitic
work and could therefore not be reproduce without the permission of the
author.
cf.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Postage_stamp_thumb.jpg
AFAIK, the information provided on this page is wrong. This image can't be
under a free licence. Can a lawyer can confirm or refute that?
I asked this here but got no answer:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_talk:Postage_stamp_thumb.jpg
Best regards,
Yann
--
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