[Foundation-l] a new free image!

[Robert Horning]

GerardM wrote:
> Hoi,
> You must have been living under a rock to have missed the concept of a
> doctrine by the board that will disallow many licenses and practices. NC and
> ND will be explicitly prohibited. Fair use will only be possible when a
> community accepts an EDP or Exemption Doctrine Program. The EDP will even
> need to be ratified by legal council ..
>
> Images without information about copyright or license (Public Domain does
> not have a license) will be disallowed.
>
> Thanks,
>     GerardM
Yeah, I guess I was living under a rock or something here myself.  This 
is a very new philosophy coming out that the board is going to be very 
directly involved with "global" policies that directly affect the 
content of each project.  The idea that each one of the 200 or so 
"active" Wikimedia projects will each have to submit some sort of "EDP" 
to legal counsel, overcoming language and local legal issues too, seems 
to be something so absurd as to be unworkable as well.

Who is paying for this legal counsel?  The WMF?  Individual users?  
"local" chapters?  And what does "ratified" mean in this context?

I don't see any problem with the board coming out and saying that NC and 
ND images need to be eventually removed, with strong encouragement that 
individual projects stop accepting any new images that violate this 
philosophy and set a reasonable timeline to eventually remove all such 
content on their local projects.

I also don't see a problem with establishing a general philosophy akin 
to the NPOV and No original research "pillars" that are generally in 
most Wikimedia projects which would also strongly discourage fair use 
images.  The devil is in the details here, and if the WMF wants to get 
into trying to establish individual policies for each project, the WMF 
also accepts liability for such policies.  I'm not so sure that 
increasing WMF liability is necessarily a good course of action here.

This top down attitude is something that I'm not very comfortable with, 
particularly when we are mainly dealing with voluntary community leaders 
here, especially when it comes to working with the nearly 5,000 
individual administrators who would bear the brunt of trying to 
implement both the culling of this content and watching over individual 
projects to make sure this sort of content doesn't creep back in.  I'm 
guessing that it is this group to whom the policy is really going to 
matter anyway.  All of these admins, with perhaps a few exceptions, are 
the most experienced of Wikimedia users and are largely the ones who 
perform the day to day tasks that make the projects what they are.  
Certainly they are helping to build the infrastructure and other aspects 
of the projects that help support content development.

-- Robert Horning