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

[Gregory Maxwell]

Pedro Sanchez wrote on Thu Feb 8 20:23:36 UTC 2007:
>I'll try to reword Gregory's argument since I think it's still not
>clear to you (and for what I see, most it: people).
>
>1. On italy, you're allowed to publish with permission but not under fair use.
>2. So you can upload if you get permission
>3. Once the file has been uploaded in italy with permission, USA
people can access it
>4. Should the cirterion met, USA people can reuse the content under
fair use (since there,
>fair use applies no matter what the licencing terms are (permission or not))
>
>therefore he's suggesting you to tag your images with the text
>* This image has been published in  Italy with permission (not under
nonexistent "italy fair
>use")
>* This image *could* be used on some other countries as fair use
where those countries
>law allow it
>
>Am I right greg? Did I explain it correctly?

Yes, although I should make sure to be really clear.  (2) is only okay
if (4) would be possible. The reason for this is that we want the
material submitted to itwikis to be maximally free in the rest of the
world. Itwiki is used far outside of Italy... Even 15% of its edits
come from outside Italy.

We don't care about only the US, we also care about the whole world..
Countries that I believe have explicit law similar in intent to fair
use include Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Germany,
Hungary, Japan, Poland, Sweeden, United Kingdom.. and pretty much
every place that was at one point a UK holding. Of course, it's also
the case that it exists in Italian law too, but people here are
insisting that it only applies to text. This doesn't appear to be the
case to me, but I will not argue.

I think that is far too much smoke here for such a small amount of
fire. On itwiki the images impacted by this seem to be mostly tagged
with {{Copyrighted}}.  If we look at the whatlinkshere
(http://it.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Speciale:PuntanoQui/Template:Copyrighted&limit)
 we find that there are less than 2,000 images in this state. Is all
this concern from itwiki really just about 2,000 images or are there
several other templates that I am missing?

In any case, if you go through these images you will find many images
that anyone could take, public buildings and such. You will also find
many images created by Italian Wikipedians who are deciding to not
release their work under a free license.  This is a terrible thing,
and it's deeply troubling that anyone thought that these images were
ever okay.