On 5/17/06, Steve Bennett stevage@gmail.com wrote:
On 5/17/06, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
And how do we tell that the image is "GFDL without requested attribution?".
By looking at the image description and seeing if they request attribution?
Right but since we can't do this automatically there is no way to check.
... This will be a nightmare to police, and I don't see how we can easily get the software to enforce it.
So is getting people not to upload copyrighted images, a far greater problem. There are many things we can't enforce. This seems a trivial problem.
We do enforce that to a degree. We have tools, methods of detection, procedures... it's all rather complicated. I've had several tens of thousands of problem images deleted, issues detected via automated analysis, reviewed by humans gone..
It's harder to do with this... We have to constantly fight against the fact that many people's instincts WRT copyright tell them to do the wrong thing. "I made this screenshot of the starwars movie, I own the copyright, and I release it into the public domain".
We'll face the same problem with attribution-less images that anyone can create but it's even more obscure an issue. When you couple the fact that a minority of the navigation icons we're using are attributionless licensed right now, all I can see us doing is creating problems.
Also, I've been checking, and many of these navigation icons have attribution requirements. Most seem to be LGPLed, taken from varrious free software packages.
What are their requirements? "Must show the following text when clicked upon?" There are lots of other ways of providing attribution information.
The attribution requirements differ somewhat from license to license but overall we're in a good position if the attribution and license data (it's not just attribution btw, the majority of copyleft licenses require you to tell the recipient what license it's under) is 1) Easily and obviously accessable, not obscured or hidden 2) Uniform and approiate for our medium
You really, really don't want MediaWiki to allow linkable images?
Excuse me? I really want us to have linkable images which we can actually use, i.e. ones that don't create copyright problems.
I love the idea of the tiny automatic (image info) link, which works great for things like portal/main page images, but I realize that it presents problems for navigation icons. I'm sure we can figure out the right solution for those as well, but we won't make progress if you're just going to dismiss me with "You really, really don't want MediaWiki to allow linkable images".
Shall I say "You really, really don't want to behave legally and ethically in regard to the content we've taken from others?" and complete the cycle of pointless accusations?