[Advocacy Advisors] Unclear usage restrictions on US Government works

[Ryan Kaldari]

This is a fairly typical case of using non-copyright restrictions (
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Non-copyright_restrictions) to
try to limit reuse. The practice on Commons is to typically just ignore
such restrictions. Surprisingly, it's actually not a topic of much debate
or discussion on Commons. I imagine this is because there are much juicier
problems in actual copyright law to deal with. The only discussions I know
about are:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/File:Miyuki_Hatoyama_Michelle_Obama_Yukio_Hatoyama_and_Barack_Obama_20090923.jpg

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump/Archive/2009Sep#White_House_photos.3F

Ryan Kaldari


On Tue, Sep 24, 2013 at 10:25 AM, Stephen LaPorte <slaporte at wikimedia.org>wrote:

> Public Knowledge has an interesting article about ambiguous usage
> restrictions appearing on some US government photographs and video:
>
> "The White House is not explicitly claiming copyright on these photos (the
> license makes that clear), but this type of scary quasi-legal language gets
> awful close to flirting with a bit of light copyfraud."
>
>
> http://www.publicknowledge.org/blog/what-going-usage-restrictions-media-congress-
>
> I know a number of Wikimedians are interested / activist in this area --
> Jean-Frédéric had a great session on this general subject at Wikimania
> 2012. Do you know any other Wikimedians working on this? Does Commons have
> any documentation or guidelines on the topic?
>
> --
> Stephen LaPorte
> Legal Counsel
> Wikimedia Foundation
>
> *For legal reasons, I may only serve as an attorney for the Wikimedia
> Foundation. This means I may not give legal advice to or serve as a lawyer
> for community members, volunteers, or staff members in their personal
> capacity.*
>
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