On 5/21/06, Peter Mackay peter.mackay@bigpond.com wrote:
My question about the ethics of claiming a photograph taken by someone else as your own is a legitimate one. It applies to a great many photographs on user pages. How I got to this particular is really immaterial, and I mentioned research in case someone like you wondered why I chose this user as an example.
With respect, it's really not important, and was probably a tag slapped on in haste, knowing that no one is going to dispute the copyright of that image, and that no one is ever going to attempt to reuse it for anything. Our system isn't really geared to handle these types of images - what tag would *you* have put on it? All I can think of is getting the creator (yes, that random passerby) to write an email certifying that they release it under GFDL, and we could *still* dispute whether it was actually them or not.
We don't really have a way of dealing with images whose copyright value is so low as to actually be negligible. Copyright is not like other laws - if it's inconceivable that anyone could actually sue us over it, or even complain about it, there is not, afaik, any problem with us violating it.
Steve