[Wikimedia-l] Fwd: [Commons-l] FOP in Europe: does this include WWII monuments with art?

[Fae]

On 3 March 2013 12:10, Jane Darnell <jane023 at gmail.com> wrote:
...
> In that discussion, the whole category for the Washington, DC Vietnam
> memorial was nominated for deletion, see here:
> http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:WhatLinksHere/Category:Vietnam_Veterans_Memorial
> The last word on that discussion was "I called the Smithsonian and the
> Park Service about this. Aside from laughing, they were confused why
> anyone would assume that the copyright was owned by anyone except the
> USGov, or that it wan't in the PD. I can't get anyone on the record
> about this."
>
> I would go so far as to assume that the same is true for Dutch WWII
> memorials, and if we cannot come up with a good way of preserving
> Dutch WWII memorial images for the Dutch Wikimedia community to use in
> any Wikipedia project (so not just the NL wiki), then I propose a
> Dutch Wikipedia blackout on May 4th out of protest, since obviously
> the only hindrance is the fear of Wikimedia Commons users that they
> will be legally pursued, and I assume that this fear is real enough
> that we can go public with it.
>
> On a personal level, as a Dutch citizen, I would be willing to be the
> first to be tried legally on such an issue, and after my discussion
> this morning, I believe I could crowd source my legal fees with
> support from the Dutch Wikipedia community.

Hi Jane,

I know it's all rather frustrating. I suggest a common sense approach
to the Commons community. There are a few rather good copyright
wikilawyers that dominate the discussion on Commons, the primary way
of handling them (us?) is to make sure that there is (i) clear policy
or agreed guidelines and (ii) legal clarification and external advice
where this would be helpful. Our critical wikilawyers do not make the
law, but they do help highlight how daft it can be at times. :-)

Now, in the *real world*, there is unlikely to be any issue were the
GLAM project you envisage to upload 1,000 or 100,000 images. A tiny
percentage will be deleted for various reasons, as a matter of course,
no matter how hard you try to run detailed guidelines. The idea that
such a project either must not proceed, or would be judged a failure
by the Wikimedia community, were a single image to be a potential
copyright problem, is not feasible, and we do not want such great
projects to be paralysed for fear of criticism because we have not got
full answers to every possible risk. The key Commons policy to
consider is the Precautionary Principle, so long as there are no
*significant* doubts with regard to copyright, then this indicates it
is perfectly okay to upload images where one has taken simple and
obvious precautions.[1]

Commons benefits from another great community approach, that of
staying mellow, you may want to take the Smithsonian's approach and
laugh most of this away. I suggest rather than brinkmanship and
calling for black-outs and legal cases, you consider different avenues
of community consultation, such as relevant questions on the village
pump, the copyright noticeboard and set up a GLAM Commons WikiProject
page for long term guidelines for your project members to discuss and
improve. With such consultation banked, it would be hard for anyone to
come along later and criticise you for not trying to address the issue
and reach a practical conclusion.[2][3][4][5]

My viewpoint is as a well known Wikimedia Commons contributor with
40,000+ image uploads, 600,000+ edits and over 1.2 million further
edits by bot. Oh, and I do other more important stuff too. :-D

Links
1. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Project_scope/Precautionary_principle
2. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Staying_mellow
3. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:GLAM
4. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump/Copyright
5. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump

Cheers,
Fae
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