[WikiEN-l] Upload by default to Commons?

[Fastfission]

On 5/3/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> If the copy of the painting was made within the uk it is quite posible
> it is under copyright. Or at least the copyright status would be
> rather complex.

Only in the UK, and even that is ambiguous only because there haven't
been any cases challenging that yet (as far as I know). No copyright
status would be recognized in the US at all. I think it's pretty
low-priority on our copyright issues, given that as far as I know
there's no evidence that a photo of 15th century 2-D art would be
considered copyrighted in the UK. (Museums are of course shaking in
their boots over the idea, but that's only because they stand to
potentially lose money over it. As a principle it is entirely unsound
that an exact reproduction of a public domain work should generate any
new copyrights; it completely undermines the idea of the public domain
in the first place.)

>
> > The image deletion process is, unfortunately, institutionalizing the
> > assumption of bad faith.
>
> There is a differnce between assumeing good faith and assumeing judgement

I agree completely. I think the burden of proof in copyright matters
has to be with the uploader, which does somewhat undercut "assume good
faith" in situations where things have been improperly or ambiguously
tagged.

FF