On 12/5/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
Whatever legal system the rest of en Wikipedia operates under - presumably US law.
Assumeing you mean what legal system wikipedai puts the most effort into following then yes that would be US law when it comes to copyright.
We're talking about publicity shots aren't we?
You didn't state that in your example.
As in, photos that are provided to the media so they can write puff pieces about them...presumably the publicist owns the copyright, and presumably it is legal for the media to use them this way. So presumably also legal for Wikipedia to use them as the lead image for relevant articles. But possibly not legal for downstream Wikipedia content reusers...
Also may not be legal to edit the images which pesents problems. Would need to see the exact terms of the release though.
The interesting issue though is that we probably have permission to use these types of images without resorting to "fair use", but we actually prohibit ourselves from using that kind of image: we accept free images, we accept fair use...but not "permission granted for Wikipedia". It's a strange one.
Very stong fair use cases could potentialy be the equiverlent of free.
I guess "we can use" is a self-imposed limitation that doesn't have much to do with the law.
It has a fair bit to do with the law since the problems verious restictions (or strangely the lack of them) can cause are part of the reason we try to avoid them.