[Commons-l] Copyright is hard (was Re: Professional photographers on Commons: sucess story)

[Brianna Laugher]

Rama, nice post. :)

On 07/11/2007, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> Yeah. Looking at his talk page makes me sad -- the usual round of
> scripted & stacked image deletion warnings for copyright reasons. We
> need socially more appropriate ways to deal with copyright issues.

The thing is...
Copyright is hard. It is a brick wall that is high, and I don't know
of any way of getting around it easily or quickly that isn't cheating,
ie fundamentally wrong, and likely to bite you on the arse in the
future. It's like weight loss, there is only one way that works - the
hard way.

You can be a great Wikimedian and not run into copyright for a long
time. You do not have to have a good understanding of copyright in
order to be a good contributor. This is because when you're only
contributing your own work, you don't run up against the copyright
wall. I'm giving my text up for free, OK, and anyone can use it
however they like, OK. But *as soon as* you want to include someone
else's work -- and for the vast majority of people, this is when they
want to include an image by someone else -- you meet the copyright
wall.

It's just so hard. Even if you wanted to minimise troubles and only
pick images from Flickr, you have to know which licenses are the
acceptable ones. Then - is this a derivative of anything else? Is it
reasonable that this user is in fact the copyright holder? Has this
user understood what they have agreed to by picking this license? What
if they change it? And this is an easy case. Pick up random-website
"attribution" like statements, or PD-age related questions and you can
soon give yourself a nice headache, trying to find the correct answer
when the fact is there is no one in the world that knows for sure what
it is, you only get that certainty with an expensive lawsuit.

There is no shortcut through these questions. There's no alternative
but to face each one as it comes and see how it applies to that
situation.

Given that Wikimedia = free content + anyone can edit, it seems that
by default it(we) must also take on the task of educating the general
public about copyright issues. No one else is doing it, and it's an
issue that has to be confronted, so it looks like it's up to us.

The instantaneous editing feature of Wikimedia conflicts with the
slower copyright learning process. It's pretty obvious that automated
templates are not the best solution to this overall dilemma but I
don't have any great ideas about where to next.

regards,
Brianna
user:pfctdayelise

-- 
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