[Foundation-l] a heads-up on Wikimedia France's adventures with the French cultural authorities

[Teofilo]

Hello GerardM,

I follow you on the multilingual issue. Some of the manyfold copyright
symbols I quoted in my previous message might apply to the annotating
text, and let alive creative text writers have the possibility to sell
their text for money. But that should not allow them to add a
copyright symbol on a photograph taken before 1906 by somebody else.

The topic raised in this discussion is not every GLAM. It is those
GLAM paid with the taxpayer's money which are part of the government
administration. I think the government should respect scrupulously
what the lawmaker is saying in the copyright law concerning Public
Domain. The Wikimedia Foundation and Chapters should not provide help
to civil servants wanting to have more than what the lawmaker allows
them to have. If the French Chapter capitulates in front of the civil
servant lobby, then the French Chapter loses any kind of
representativity of the public's interest. Ultimately, the French
Chapter would lose the public's confidence.

2009/9/25, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com>:
> Hoi,
> The world is not so simple. When we accept material from a GLAM in a low
> resolution, we should be happy with what we get. When a GLAM considers this
> an acceptance that this material is copyrightable they are wrong. When we
> accept material we get it with annotations, we get it with all the aspects
> that make this material worthwhile.
>
> Our Commons material is useless if it was not for our categories, the
> annotations of the material that we store. This is in my opinion the most
> important part of the picture because this is what gives our material
> relevance and makes it possible to find it. This is at the same time the
> biggest problem of Commons. You can only find things when you know your
> English.
> Thanks,
>     GerardM