[Foundation-l] precisions about the recent WMF "fair use" decision

[Robert Scott Horning]

David Monniaux wrote:

>>US military photos and trade fairs. Also various open days. About the
>>only think you won't get is NK stuff such as Ch'onma-ho
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>So, only US hardware and activities. So much for NPOV. (There are tons of interesting things
>that you won't see unless you're in operations. Trade fairs will show only small arms.)
>  
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>>/ * spacecraft
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>/
>  
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>>NASA for a lot of stuff and countries tend to put a lot of their space
>>hardware on display
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>NASA => only US
>
>You've therefore made the point that our current policies favor the broadcasting of the
>activities of the US government. So much for NPOV. :-)
>  
>
Perhaps there is some merit to the philosohpy that the U.S. Federal 
Government has that all of its publications are released to the public 
domain.  What value crown copyright actually gives the government in the 
UK is beyond me, but perhaps by showing some of the other governments 
that they don't need to be so paranoid about copyright (including many 
U.S. state governments) and trying to milk every last drop of money from 
content produced by salaried employees of these governments that perhaps 
there are some strong benefits to their own citizens and to their 
country as a whole if they would "lighten up" and allow some sort of 
free usage of this sort of content.

Is NASA really the only national space agency that releases images that 
can be used under terms compatable with the GFDL and Wikimedia Commons 
restrictions?  I know ESA releases their images under a non-commercial 
use only license, but there have been attempts to try and open that 
licensing up a bit more to something more akin to the standard CC-by-SA 
type license.

-- 
Robert Scott Horning