[WikiEN-l] Common sense exceptions to our copyright policy.

[Fastfission]

On 7/27/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> Thoughts?

I think the general intent is a good one, though I don't think that
the Wikipedia system of government would allow any individual to
easily sit in such a position with the exception of Jimbo.

There may be other ways to achieve the same ends, though. Perhaps we
could draw up special rules for exceptions on copyright issues -- they
would be VERY hard to satisfy and would be designed with the few known
cases of "common sense" exceptions in mind (and could amended later if
others popped up). Then it could just become part of a deletion review
or image policy or what have you.

Personally I think there is a lot of room for a little commonsense
flexibiity in images -- people get all bent out of shape about whether
or not it is hypothetical that the German government could decide to
enforce all copyrights on Nazi photographs that defaulted to them,
even though there is no reason to think that they ever will and it is
questionable whether or not they have the legal standing to do that
even if they wanted to. Ditto with people worrying that just because
you can copyright a lighting arrangement scheme, suddenly all
photographs of the building with this scheme become derivative works
and copyright infringement. In both cases the legal danger is entirely
hypothetical and dubious at that -- they are based on stretched and
literal interpretations of complicated aspects of the copyright law
and nobody has ever been taken to court over them. And yet they are
used to delete widely circulated historical content (the Nazi images)
or even user-produced free content (in terms of the lighting and
architecture issues).

I don't know the best way around it -- having a class of images that
says "this image is hypothetically copyrighted but Jesus Christ people
it's not ever going to make trouble for anyone, even commercial
reusers" is, I think, likely to be misapplied unless it is closely
watched. I don't know if that should be done by one individual, by a
committee, by anyone who feels up to it, etc.

FF