On 02/03/2014 01:26, geni wrote:
On 1 March 2014 23:59, ??? wiki-list@phizz.demon.co.uk wrote:
On 01/03/2014 23:06, geni wrote:
On 1 March 2014 19:58, ??? wiki-list@phizz.demon.co.uk wrote:
You have no guarantee that the account that the images were scraped from held the copyright in the first place, and as such you are unable to pass that guarantee on to any one else.
Want means its an objective not something we have actually archived yet.
Then it is an objective that cannot be fulfilled unless you get written clarification from all the accounts that are being scraped on flickr and elsewhere, that the images contained within the accounts were taken by the account holder.
There are various approaches. Personally I'd like to see the software modified so images can be tagged by level of certainty with regards to their copyright status.
Many flickr accounts collect images found on the web. Many of them upload those images under a CC license, because "images on the web are all public domain".
Those are usually fairly obvious and can be avoided for the most part.
Really? You may be able to detect those that have an AP or Getty watermark and similar, but with other flickr streams it is not so clear. A few years ago one poster to flickr was uploading images taken a pre-Arab Spring protests in Egypt. All of them were uploaded as CC-BY-SA, but they weren't all from the same photographer. As I recall people were sending him the photos and he was uploading them to flickr, and then these were being reused on various anti-Mubarek blogs. Whether or not everyone that was emailing photos was aware of the CC licenses that were being added is unknown. A casual observer would not of been able to detect that the stream was from dozens of photographers. Names were kept out of the uploads and the EXIF data was removed for obvious reasons.
Again on flickr people may set there default upload settings to CC-BY-SA and by and large only upload images that they have taken. However, that doesn't mean that everything they upload is something they have taken.
Other sites offer CC-BY-SA images, and there is no guarantee that the uploader to those sites is the copyright holder either.
On Commons there are a number of people trawling through websites offering CC-BY-SA images, and uploading them to Commons. There is absolutely no guarantee that they are properly licensed. Even if they are, there is no traceability to show that in five years time the anon uploader to the original site (if the original site still exists) is the same person that is claiming copyright on the images.
The bottom line here is that IF your business relies on CC-BY-SA images, then you are unwise to take at face value any CC-BY-SA license, particularly commercial use, unless YOU have traceability. That today Commons can provide any guarantee that the images it holds are properly licensed is a fantasy.