[Foundation-l] Czech Wikipedia's EDP and WMF's licensing policy

[Brian McNeil]

I have absolutely no idea what the potential legal issues you may face may
be. However, I assume from your mail you already have a limited collection
of images you have tagged as "fair use" (eg company logos). Unless you have
lawyers or - at least - law students working on the project you might not be
able to get good advice on how you should handle the issue and avoid
problems.

My (purely personal) opinion is you should make an issue out of this before
it becomes a problematic issue for the foundation. Approach organisations
you've covered and used logos from under fair use and where coverage has
been non-controversial. Discuss with groups like this how your local laws
may be inappropriate for a totally free press *before* you're in conflict
with them. It may not work with your legal system, but I'm not aware of any
that doesn't take precedent and the like into account. If you have this
history and someone who gets negative coverage decides to make an issue out
of it you've already laid the groundwork to defeat their argument.


Brian McNeil

-----Original Message-----
From: foundation-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:foundation-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Michal
Zlatkovsky
Sent: 19 December 2007 12:58
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
Subject: [Foundation-l] Czech Wikipedia's EDP and WMF's licensing policy

Hello,
after the Board approved the licensing policy 
(http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Licensing_policy in case 
anyone forgot :) ), we have written an EDP on Czech Wikipedia that 
allows us to use things like company logos under certain conditions 
(okay with US and Czech laws, ie. explicit permission needed; okay with 
GFDL, ie. can be nonderivative; no free image available; fair use-like 
rationale) and we've been using it for a while. However, I talked to 
pfctdayelise about our EDP today and her opinion is that the 
Foundation's licensing policy was targeted to "legal loopholes" like 
fair use or fair dealing - and as we don't have any such thing in the 
Czech Republic (and I'm pretty confident we don't, there have been 
numerous discussions about that), our EDP is invalid and we can't make 
any exception policy at all.

I think her interpretation is correct and we at Czech Wikipedia should 
revoke out EDP, but I'd like to hear more opinions, and as I don't 
expect any official reply, I'm trying this mailing list. So, what do you 
think? :)

Thanks,
Michal Zlatkovsky, [[m:User:Timichal]]

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