[Foundation-l] Clearing up Wikimedia's media licensing policies

[Brianna Laugher]

This is a great mail to receive, thanks for your work, Kat.

On 08/02/07, Kat Walsh <kwalsh at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> Since individual projects have differing community standards and there
> are potentially legal issues in different jurisdictions, individual
> projects may choose to be more restrictive than Foundation policy
> requires, such as the many projects that do not allow "fair use" media
> at all. However, no project may have content policies less restricive,
> or that allow licenses other than those allowed on Wikimedia Commons
> and limited fair use.

There have been some recent deletion debates on Common, primarily
concerning "country-specific" PD tags, which might require further
comment on this point. (see below)

Also, the wording here implies that "Foundation policy" can be equated
with "licenses allowed on Wikimedia Commons". One one hand, the WMF is
unlikely to want to start handing out an explicit list of acceptable
licenses, so that is understandable. But on the other it means that
the nuances of Foundation policy are being decided on one wiki and
having conseuqences for all wikis. Correct me if I'm wrong but this is
the first time this happens, I think.
If this is correct, will the WMF be supplying some legal assistance
from time to time for Commons? (such as the cases that follow)


Note: these debates were unsurprisingly quite heated, but they are
closed for now, and I would appreciate it if we could avoid re-hashing
the debate here.

1. First case is PD-Italy, which was deleted.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:PD-Italy
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/Template:PD-Italy

I believe that IT.wp chose to upload many of the Commons PD-Italy
images locally. Please  see the wording on their template:
http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:PD-Italia

At the time I think we all thought this was an OK solution, since the
laws are not easy to interpret, and each project (Commons and IT.wp)
was just making the best interpretation they could.

Given your above statement, is this in fact acceptable or not?

2. Another big case was PD-Soviet. (it now RDRs to {{copyvio}})
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/Template:PD-Soviet

Lots and lots of discussion about this one:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template_talk:PD-Soviet
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template_talk:PD-USSR

It appears to me that RU.wp chose to follow the Commons' solution and
depreciate the template, rather than upload files locally. See
http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A8%D0%B0%D0%B1%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%BD:PD-Soviet
(PD-old and PD-Russia are both accepted on Commons)
I am not sure if other Wikipedias depreciated the template or uploaded locally.

3. German logos.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Logo-Germany
DE.wp has a lot of logos tagged as "PD-ineligible" which American or
British readers would be baffled to believe. (Probably other
jurisdictions too. These are only two that I know for sure, do not
treat logos in the German way.)
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/Template:Logo-Germany

Trademarks have always been a very hairy case for Commons. We choose
to follow a stricter interpretation than DE.wp, but I think it is a
big enough wiki with enough sensible people that their interpretation
is probably correct for Germany. So they are being "less restrictive"
than Commons, but is that OK or not?

regards,
Brianna
user:pfctdayelise