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

[Ray Saintonge]

Mark Wagner wrote:

> Nothing will change for en.wiki? Hardly. If I'm reading this
>
>correctly, most of the images used under a claim of "fair use" are no
>longer allowed, and we'll need to figure out how to delete some
>200,000 images, as well as how to educate thousands of users who are
>used to uploading those sorts of images.
>
Record album covers? book covers?  publicity shots?  These are all used 
to such an extent that the owners can be treated as having abandoned 
copyright

>Further, it may disallow images that are public domain because they
>were published in the United States prior to 1923: such images are
>extremely common on en.wiki because "published before 1923" is much
>easier to determine than "author died before 1936".
>
I can't see your logic there.  It may apply to some images published 
outside the US before 1923, but if they were published in the US then US 
rules would apply.  Where the author or photographer is unknown we can't 
very well go by his death date.