[Foundation-l] Board resolutions on controversial content and images of identifiable people

[phoebe ayers]

On Thu, Jun 2, 2011 at 1:28 AM, Federico Leva (Nemo) <nemowiki at gmail.com> wrote:
> Risker, 02/06/2011 00:53:
>> I think the more important part of this announcement is the resolution on
>> images of identifiable people  [...]
>
> I agree. It's also the first time (if memory serves me well and if I
> understand it correctly) that the board asks for a specific content
> policy of a specific project to be changed in some direction:
> «Strengthen [...] the current Commons guideline», compared to «_continue
> to practice_ rigorous active curation of content» in the other
> resolution. I'm not sure I like it, although the spirit of the
> resolutions is balanced and agreeable.
>
>> It should probably be emphasized that this would apply equally to projects
>> that host "fair use" or other images, and is not simply an expectation on
>> Commons.
>
> That's not what the resolution says, though.

Hi Nemo and all,

I don't want to get into wikilawyering (that dread disease!), but the
resolution does state that we urge the global community to:
"Ensure that all projects that host media have policies in place
regarding the treatment of images of identifiable living people in
private situations."

In other words, we recognize that these concerns apply to any project
that hosts images. However, clearly the vast majority of our photos
are on Commons and Commons already has an example of such a policy
(inspiring this resolution); that policy could be an inspiration for
policies on other projects.

I think that it would be
> more interesting to have some clear legal guideline to understand what's
> /legal/ in different countries (at least the most important ones, or the
> countries whose citizens more frequently ask deletion of images to the
> WMF), because this is something the community is often not able to
> produce and the WMF has the indisputable right to keep the projects
> lawful (at least in some countries, which are tough to define; see e.g.
> the quite generic draft
> <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Legal/Legal_Policies#Applicable_Law>).

I agree this would be helpful. However, I think the spirit of the
consent guideline, and of this resolution, is more in line with other
editorial policies  -- it's a common-sense guideline that is meant to
encourage special editorial care under particular circumstances, and
we are stating that being freely licensed by itself is not enough in
these cases. This is part of being a curated collection.

There are parallels here with the BLP resolution
(http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Biographies_of_living_people),
and those are intentional. In that resolution, we don't tell the
editorial community that they need to understand every detail of libel
law in every country; rather, simply that particular editorial care
should be exercised in those cases. Similarly, image copyright law is
exceedingly complex (though if anyone can figure it out I bet it's
Wikimedians) but that's not quite the point: this is an editorial
discussion. I think Risker laid out some of the issues involved very
well.

-- phoebe