[Wikimedia-l] Licencing question

[Matthew Roth]

On Tue, Jan 22, 2013 at 8:51 AM, Richard Symonds <
richard.symonds at wikimedia.org.uk> wrote:

> All,
>
> I have a question for you which I am sure you will enjoy discussing. It's
> about licencing.
>
> Wikimedia sites do not use a 'byline' on their images - for example,
> http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page requires an image to be
> clicked
> on before you can view the licence and the author information. The same
> applies for Wikipedia, and the WMF (and WMUK) blogs.
>

Hi Richard,
On the Wikimedia blog, we include "Copyright notes" at the bottom of each
post with images and include the Title of the photo, the author's name (and
link to userpage if available) and the link to the relevant license page on
CC or elsewhere. See for example:
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/01/19/wikimedia-sites-move-to-primary-data-center-in-ashburn-virginia/

This process was formalized after a Commons user pointed out to us that we
appeared not to be in compliance with the URI sub-clause of the CC-BY-SA
license. cf sections 4 a) and 4 b) here:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode

Our legal team affirmed the Commons user's assertion and we have
subsequently implemented the Copyright notes special field in the admin end
or our blog. You can see a bit more info here on the instructions we give
to post authors and editors:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Blog/Guidelines#Add_Copyright_Notes

thanks,
Matthew

-- 

Matthew Roth
Global Communications Manager
Wikimedia Foundation
+1.415.839.6885 ext 6635
www.wikimediafoundation.org
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