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

[Oldak Quill]

On 31/07/06, Fastfission <fastfission at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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 used to delete widely circulated historical content (the Nazi images)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).

Although I entirely agree with you on the Nazi copyright issue (though
I think the images copyrights defaulted to Bavaria, which further
complicates matters). Buildings are a problem for our contributors. A
well known example of this is the Eiffel Tower whose owners have been
known to chase down those who claim copyright over night-time pictures
of the tower due to the particular way they arrange the lights.
-- 
Oldak Quill (oldakquill at gmail.com)