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

[Cary Bass]

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SlimVirgin wrote:
> 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.
I'd like to point out that in fact, these images would be accepted on
to Commons, because Commons respects the country of origin rule rather
than the PD-US rule that more often applies on the English Wikipedia.

- --
Cary Bass
Volunteer Coordinator, Wikimedia Foundation

Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
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