[Foundation-l] [Commons-l] PD-art and official "position of the WMF"

[Erik Moeller]

2008/8/21 Luiz Augusto <lugusto at gmail.com>:
> So, yes, there is a need to an official statement. Erik and Mike have given
> theirs *opinions*.

There are three separate questions here:

1) Does hosting these images put the WMF in legal danger? Mike has
weighed in on this, and said that based on the record so far, there is
no reason to assume that this is the case. If you want to know if
something should be deleted to protect WMF from harm, Mike is the
person to ask. He has been asked and has answered.

2) Does WMF's licensing policy require Commons to delete these images
to remain free-as-in-freedom? Our organizational response has always
been "no", dating back to Jimmy's first public statements on the
matter years ago, our response to demands to remove PD-Art images,
etc. I co-authored both the licensing policy and the Definition of
Free Cultural Works it refers to; I believe I can safely say that
neither of these documents was intended to suggest deletion of PD-Art
images.

3) Is the Commons community free to decide that, in spite of 1) and
2), it wants to delete some PD-Art images in order to be maximally
free-as-in-freedom? As far as I can tell, the answer is "yes", in the
absence of an explicit Board-level policy statement on PD-Art images.
None of my or Mike's comments was intended to suggest otherwise.

I hope that clarifies the situation.
-- 
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

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