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

[Marco Chiesa]

On 2/8/07, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell a gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> 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.


I agree that we can get rid of the images for which a free alternative is
possible. Of course there are people that think that commercial reuse of
their work is evil, they'll cope with that. In
http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bar/Discussioni/Censimento_licenze_immaginithere
is a very recent analysis of the images present on
it.wiki. It makes about 12-13k non-free images. This includes 4k coat of
arms of Italian municipalities, which, independent of copyright, require the
municipality permission for reuse. Plus, of course, many a user on
it.wikiis really pissed that fair use won't be phased out.

Marco (Cruccone)