No subject

bring free licenses in Serbia. At April (or May) of 2006 I finally
find a lawyer who were willing to work on introducing CC licenses into
the Serbian law system (actually, she found me). With her colleague
from the Institute for Law (I think that this is the name), we had two
best creative copyright lawyers from Serbia.

And the story related to one of the subjects of this thread begins here.

Unlike a lot of other projects with similar size (of number of
contributors and articles), projects in Serbian language had the best
possible lawyer support (for one country of something more then 7
millions of inhabitants).

But it wasn't enough.

To deal with any kind of copyright problems which are not so obvious,
I had to spend hours of talks with them without *any* conclusion
because it was simply not possible to do anything.

Then I realized that the best thing is not to do anything except if WM
Serbia is explicitly in danger. (Thanks to good circumstances, nothing
was happened.) And, of course, to leave her to finish CC localization.

So, let's summarize:
- Serbian language projects are relatively small.
- Unlikely the most other projects of similar size, it has supporting
local chapter.
- Unlikely the most other projects of similar size, it has good lawyers.
- Unlikely the most other projects of similar size, it had at least
three persons (one of others is a doctor of mathematics from
Princeton; the second one is an important member of the community who
is working in a municipal court) from the community who hardly worked
on copyright issues with relevant lawyers.
- We worked on this issue for at least 6 months.
- And we did nothing. (Yes, we did categorization of images and
similar project related things, but we did nothing in relation to
possible usage or prohibited usage by Serbian laws.) For example,
Serbian (and Montenegrin) fair use is much more permissive then US (in
general it stays: "Use it while your usage is reasonable").

And when the Board resolution came, we had a serious problem: I didn't
want to take care about copyrighted works and the most interested
person in free use issue is living in USA.

So, even we had much more possibilities to deal with fair use on
Serbian language projects then the most of other language projects
(actually, all except English, French, German, Italian and Polish), we
simply were not able to deal with fair use problem.

De.wiki decided not to keep non free images; en.wiki decided to keep.
The most predictable decision of sr.wiki would be to keep fair use
image (I would vote against, but it was not a dominant opinion). How
much other projects voted about this issue? And how much of them
simply realized that they are not able to deal with law issues and
didn't want to vote?

At the end, the only conclusion is that it is possible to have
something only if your project is big enough to keep this. And I think
that this is very problematic situation for Wikimedian aims.

BTW, I completely understand Board's decision. While I would insist
not to make half-decision, it is completely reasonable to say: OK, we
don't support this, but if you are willing to do such things, you have
to take care about it. However, such decision is unfair toward small
projects.

And about nonfree.wikimedia: Of course, it shouldn't be a place for
every free use image. It should something like Debian's non-free
repository (there is no even Adobe Acrobat there). And policy on
en.wiki seems to me very reasonable as a basis of nonfree.wikimedia
project.

On 8/24/07, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> On 8/24/07, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I agree that we should permit the use of logos in Wikipedia articles.
> > Thats why I support the policies which allow limited fair use images..
> > Logos and the like clearly fit inside of that.  As a result I don't
> > think we need to do anything else.
> >
> > Erik, I understand that you're unhappy with Dewp's decisions about
> > these matters ... but their position is a long standing one.
>
> 1) My post has nothing to do with de.wp - please do not attribute false motives.
>
> 2) de.wp does permit non-free logos, under the assumption that they
> are "public domain" due to insufficient creativity, an assumption
> which they base on a German court ruling. They apply this logic even
> to US logos, e.g. http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/20th_Century_Fox ; this
> is problematic and WMF is aware of it.
>
> 3) We are talking about a specific class of works: identifying works.
> I think it is perfectly reasonable to try to come up with a standard
> of freedom for such works, and to then open up our archives to allow
> uploading of those works which meet this standard to a central
> archive.  Whether that archive should or shouldn't be Commons and
> whether one should use the vocabulary of the free culture movement for
> those logos is open to debate.
>
>
> --
> Toward Peace, Love & Progress:
> Erik
>
> DISCLAIMER: This message does not represent an official position of
> the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees.
>
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