Actually, being a lawyer and a PhD candidate in copyright law, I think do have "legal mind" :-)

And there are some others on juriwiki-l too :-)

Is copyright.or.kr a governement institution?

Anyway, I know some legal scholars in Korea, and I can contact them to obtain more precise information. But it will take some time.

I'll follow the link and I forward this to juriwiki-l

Best,

Jean-Baptiste Soufron

Puzzlet Chung wrote:

User:WonYong, who insisted that the contents of Wikipedia should be restricted by National Security Law weeks ago ( http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2006-January/043321.html ), claims that copyrighted images can be uploaded to Korean Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons, through "quotation policy."

Some months ago, WonYong wanted to upload image files from South Korean government, but found that they are copyrighted and not allowed to be uploaded. Now he came up with a new (proposed) policy that allows uploading almost any image files. His point is that even copyrighted images can be _quoted_ in Wikipedia articles, just like citations in academic articles. He says that he won't no longer need fair use, which he had proposed in Korean Wikipedia before.

South Korean copyright law states that publicized materials may be quoted for report, research, or educational purposes, within a reasonable scope. A bulletin board in the Copyright Discussion and Arbitration Committee website (http://copyright.or.kr/) answered that this "quotation" article of the bill is not suitable for writing encyclopedias.

The problem is that he pushes his policy in not only Korean Wikipedia but Wikimedia Commons. He says he distrusts copyright.or.kr, and doubts that other Wikipedians and those in Commons do have "legal mind."

Ongoing discussion in Wikimedia Commons is here: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump#ALLOW_COPYRIGHTED_IMA...

And the diff is here: http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Commons%3AVillage_pump&di...

Puzzlet Chung _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

If I understand him correctly he seems to think that taking an image from a work constitutes quoting it, which isn't really the case since the image is a work in itself and taking the whole thing and reproducing is not the equivalent of quoting a paper but to reproduce it completely.

Even if his assumption about quotes held the images in question would still not be free content, which means they can't be hosted on the commons[1].

1. There are some non-free images there however, but that's not relevant here.