Jastrow wrote:
The German Wikipedia has a {{Bild-PD-alt-100}} template which states something like "the period of protection for this work has likely expired according to the provisions of German law and therefore is considered as PD". See http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorlage:Bild-PD-alt-100
Pictures older than 150 years seem to be automatically tagged as PD-old.
This was the basis for my proposal from 2006, and it was rejected for commons, and probably rightly so. 150 years might be reasonable, though if something was recently published for the first time, that may mean an even longer copyright period in some countries (including the US).
What bother me most is the de facto tolerance for pictures of fairly recent French buildings, for which the French law has no similar exception. See for instance pictures of buidings by Jean Nouvel (Institut du Monde arabe and so on). It's true we also have loads of pictures of copyrighted outdoor artworks taken in countries where freedom of panorama does not apply.
And they should all be deleted, IMHO. We have done this before several times for the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre Pyramid and the Atomium. I don't know how french law deals with "ordinary" buildings though.
-- Daniel