[Foundation-l] Clearing up Wikimedia's media licensing policies (some important points)

[Marco Chiesa]

Gregory Maxwell wrote:

>
>***Your claim that Italian copyright law does not permit fair dealing
>is incorrect: ***
>
>Under Italian law you are permitted 'abridgment, quotation or
>reproduction of fragments or parts of a work for the purpose of
>criticism or discussion, or for instructional purposes.'
>(see Italian Copyright Act Article 70; Nimmer and Geller (1998-),
>Italy, §8[2][a])
>  
>
IANAL, but I'm not sure this can be applied to works of art, photographs 
and all the non-text things we're talking about. Last months SIAE 
(Italian Society of Authors and Publishers) enforced copyright on an 
amateurial art website which was showing contemporary paintings. The 
website was describing and commenting these works, so the use of the 
pictures was "to illustrate what it was talking about". Still, this is 
copyright infringement under the Italian Law. Instructional purposes 
means that a teacher can distribute N copies of a copyrighted media to 
his/her students, but if you print a book well you have to pay the 
copyright owner his/her fair royalty.

>I would rather we not mention the ND license for an image that we use
>as fair use. By doing so we would be sending the wrong message: That
>ND licenses are somehow acceptable to us, even if only
>conditionally... that they aren't usually a result of a
>misunderstanding, and that we don't think the creative commons has
>made a mistake by mixing Free Content licenses under the same brand as
>far more restrictive licenses.  We face a constant issue where people
>ask us "Why did you delete this? I released it under creative commons
>licensing so it is free!".   People submit what they see, and if they
>see ND they will submit more of that.
>
>Although, I don't think it's the end of the world that we do mention
>it.. it is a matter of fact, and because most of our permissible
>non-free images will come from the all-rights-reserved camp, I
>seriously hope we'll never see many NC / ND + "fair use" images.  If
>we do, then we will know what a grave mistake for the world that the
>Creative Commons folks made by introducing so many licenses which are
>not free enough.
>_______________________________________________
>  
>
Fair use is NOT a license. It's a way to defend yourself when challenged 
about copyright infringement. If you have a NC media used in Wikipedia 
under fair use, why  should someone who wants to use it non-commercially 
be tricked into thinking that it is (c)All rights reserved when the 
media is actually a bit more free? Ok, not free enough for Wikimedia, 
but hey someone else may have other interests out there...

Marco (Cruccone)