[Foundation-l] Stroop report

[Yann Forget]

Hello,

Birgitte SB wrote:
> The WMF licensing policy puts the burden on being able
> to declare a work to be "free content" or else use an
> EDP.  Unless something is *really* old you have to
> know who held the copyright in order to show that
> their rights have expired.  Not being able to
> determine the copyright holder, or even being able to
> prove the copyright holder is 100% unknown and always
> was, does not release the work into the Public Domain.
>  Orphaned works are still copyrighted in the US. 
> There is no provision for a work to be declared "free
> content" unless it a) released under a free license or
> b) in the Public Domain.  *Many* works do not fit
> either of those criteria and still have 0% chance of
> anyone being awarded damages for copyright
> infringement. 
> 
> But we are limited by the WMF licensing resolustion,
> which has a very high standard for "free content" and
> what is allowed to be hosted as such on WMF servers. I
> don't particularly like the licensing resolution for a
> number of reasons, but we can't just ignore that it
> exists and decide use a different standard that is
> more appealing.

I think that this argument can be easily reversed.
Copyright without a copyright holder is just nonsense, because only the 
copyright holder can claim it. Nobody, not even the "State" or any 
public body, can do it on the holder's behalf. So I think that we should 
apply common sense, and allow images of which the copyright holder has 
disappeared in the mists of time.

> Birgitte SB

Regards,

Yann

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