On 15/08/05, James A. Bowery
<jabowery(a)laboratoryofthestates.com> wrote:
Finlay McWalter wrote:
Folks,
Algebra.com (which also goes by the name
cooldictionary.com)
appears to be leeching images directly from the wikimedia upload server.
What is the accepted means for copying the images from wikipedia? My
impression was there was some sort of copyright problem due to the fact
that, unlike the text content, the image content of Wikipedia is not,
_reliably_ under one of the free licenses such as the GFDL.
Image dumps are available from
http://download.wikimedia.org/images/
but are to be used "at your own risk" - as explained in
http://download.wikimedia.org/images/README_ABOUT_COPYRIGHT.txt
Using the appropriate database dumps you could probably select out a
reasonable subset using the template-and-category based labelling
system - i.e. delete those with no such tags, those marked as "fair
use", and any other licenses likely to be incompatible with your
mirror. Obviously, a better system, where this meta-information was
built into the dumps, or available neatly standalone, would be nice,
but not easy.
Hoi
When we publish our content, we specify a license that should be valid
for the use of our content. We have chosen GFDL and this implicitly
means that the provisions of the GFDL aply to the use of our content by
mirors as well. When we have content that is not compatible with the
GFDL, we should delete this content. It is not reasonable to expect of a
mirror to scrutinize every picture in order to find out if its license
is compatible with what we say our license is. In this I think that
Commons is doing well by ensuring that its conten is generally usable
within what we aim to do given our license.
I am of the opinion that all material that is indicated to be
problematic because it cannot be used on a comercial mirror should be
removed.
Thanks,
GerardM