[Foundation-l] Instant Commons : INCORRECT

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 6/8/06, Daniel Arnold <arnomane at gmx.de> wrote:
> Am Donnerstag, 08. Juni 2006 21:34 schrieb Gregory Maxwell:
> > Considering that we've had violations persist for months after they
> > were tagged and even brought up in a Wikimedia board meeting, I'd say
> > that our position is even weaker than napsters.
>
> Well we do our very best. I don't want to go into details why deletion on
> Commons is so much more work than in a single wikipedia, you all probably
> know it already very good. But one is for certain: We don't need more admins,
> we need more active admins and we need a change of mind of the people using
> Commons that Commons is more than a wikipedia helper project.

It's a hard problem. Implicit accept is burning us... nothing is
compelling people to help audit because auditing work is not in the
critical path for getting their image listed.

I'm not faulting any person, but rather our process causes our product
to have a fairly low quality from a licensing accuracy perspective. As
you mention  we get problems from people confusing enwiki's policy
with commons. It's not something we should be suggesting people use
without their own verification.

 I'm confident that over time we will improve things.


> There are also some things that would help Commons much more than you'd
> imagine:
> Burn all Fair Use images on *all* Wikimedia projects *now*. And I really mean
> burn. Just *mass delete* them on sight ASAP without looking back.
> I am really sick educating people afterwards that Commons is not en.wikipedia
> for example. So many people from wikipedia simply dump their stuff in Commons
> and just don't get the difference that Commons is not their Wikipedia.
>
> So please in every local wiki educate people that Fair Use is a clear NO.
> Please make this everywhere your most important image copyright policy.

I could make the exact opposite argument.  I've found quite a few
unfree images uploaded to commons tagged incorrectly as free images
because users on Dewiki understood that there was an obvious need and
little prospect of objection for some copyrighted work... so they
declared it "public domain".  An example of this was that until
recently, [[Dr._Who]] on dewiki was illustrated with a half dozen
obviously copyrighted images which were placed on commons by a de
wikipedian.

Another example along these lines is that the lack of a common sense
fairuse/fair deailings repository has caused many unreasonable claims
over what is free content. For example, rather than using commercial
logos directly, Dewiki articles are often illustrated with tightly
cropped photographs of company signs which are nearly
indistinguishable from the plain logos themselves.   Obviously the
third party rights on these images prevent them from being Free
Content, but they are none the less uploaded to commons (with
misleading tagging) because outside of enwiki we've provided no
alternative for such common sense usage.

> I know that this sounds radical to some of you but it would really help us a
> lot and it is worth the trouble (the trouble will quickly decrease after
> you're mainly done with fair use deletions).

I don't agree. A completely prohibition of the limited us of
copyrighted works ware are used in conformance with common sense and
copyright laws which respect academic discourse is likely to
dramatically increase the amount of incorrect tagging.

Today we deal fairly well with unacceptable images which are tagged as
such, but all our processes (on enwiki and commons) fail completely
once someone has made an incorrect or simply dishonest claim about an
image.

Several times I've seen images which were obvious stock photography,
uploaded by someone who only uploaded that image and a few which were
already deleted for being copyright violations... but since the
uncontactable uploader picked GFDL or PD in the drop down during their
otherwise commentless upload,  I'm placed in a position of having to
*prove* that it is a violation before the image can be removed without
hysteria.  I've always been able to do so when I've had such
suspicious, but it is a huge amount of work and an entirely thank less
job.

So please don't ask people to convert a large problem we can deal with
fairly easily (identified inappropriate use of unlicensed works) with
a slightly smaller problem that we are almost totally unable to cope
with.