On 12/11/14, 8:14 PM, Andre Engels wrote:
On Thu, Dec 11, 2014 at 6:21 PM, Russavia russavia.wikipedia@gmail.com wrote:
To answer the tractor question first. Of course not, there is nothing copyrightable in this image.
I see many copyrightable objects in this image. The tractor. The car. The logo. The boards with demonstration slogans. The clothes. The gate. Anything that has some kind of creative design is copyrighted. Which just goes to show "nothing copyrighted" is not a workable way to set our limits.
That's true. I think we do need some attempt at workable limits which try to avoid pushing too hard on fair use that essentially only qualifies Wikipedia-like entities, but also avoids deleting files that are exceedingly unlikely to result in a successful copyright suit.
I'd take the pragmatic justification for being copyright-sticklers on Commons to be: so we can provide a free-media repository that our reusers can use, even commercially and world-wide, in the reasonably secure belief that their reuse is legal, because this is truly freely licensed media.
How does one go about trying to fulfill that goal? I fear it *is* actually a fairly high bar, because there are a lot of pitfalls in copyright law through which a reuser may be successfully sued, if we are too sloppy with what we allow into our "free media repository". But it's certainly possible to also exclude things that have absolutely no chance of being a problem. Which is in itself quite difficult to predict.
-Mark