On 28 February 2014 12:43, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
You're justifying the observed, serious problems with current actions by saying "but they should work in theory!"
No. Its more that they are features rather than problems.
There have always been images hosted locally that commons won't touch. The English Wikipedia fair use stuff is probably the best known but the polish wikinews also has an Exemption Doctrine Policy. Other projects are free to file them per Resolution:Licensing policy. Of course it could be interesting to watch them try and argue that such images are PD under US law but that at the end of the day between them and the foundation.
Commons provides the base-load of free images. If projects want to use unfree images then they need to do that locally taking their language norms into account.
The trouble is that
(a) there's no natural limit of caution - we could question every single file on Commons and require OTRS for every single one *years* after the fact (as is happening with many of the files the current issue is about) - but we don't. Why is that?
Because we have no particular reason to believe they violate US copyright law.
(b) the Commons community has already gone way past the limits *the WMF has explicitly said are fully OK*.
The WMF have said no such thing.