[WikiEN-l] Images that are PD in their country of origin

[SlimVirgin]

On Mon, Feb 8, 2010 at 17:22, Michael Peel <email at mikepeel.net> wrote:
> However, that is somewhat separate from the question of images that
> are in the public domain _somewhere_. It is somewhat crazy that US
> laws dictate what public domain materials you can upload to Wikipedia
> etc - irrespective of what laws apply in your own country.
>
> One possibility that might be worth investigating is something like
> Wikilivres - which holds books that are out of copyright in Canada
> (life+50 years) but not in the US. It can do that as its servers are
> based in Canada. Could we do something similar with Wikimedia
> Commons? i.e. host multimedia content on a server in a different
> geographical area, and then have that linked in with Wikipedia in the
> same way that Commons currently is?

Or we could simply make a decision as a project to respect the
copyrights and the terms of release of the countries of origin.

I'm dealing with an image at the moment of Palestinian women refugees
resting after being expelled from their homes as the Israeli army
approached in 1948. It's in the public domain in Israel, which now
controls the area in which the image was taken. I am 99.9 percent
certain it was taken by an employee of the British War Office, which
would make it public domain in Britain and the Commonwealth (and as
far as the British are concerned that makes it PD everywhere). I sent
off for an old first edition of a book I knew it had appeared in in
the 1950s in the hope that it would explicitly credit the War Office,
but sadly it doesn't.

Because of that small doubt, I have to claim fair use. And because I
am claiming fair use, someone has said I will have to reduce the
quality of the image for it to comply with our fair-use policy. It's
insane.