[Wikipedia-l] Stamps, wiki and copyright

[Yann Forget]

Hi all,

In the discussion Wikispecies, there were a few mentions of the possibility to 
enlarge Wikipedia with coverage on postage stamps.

While some articles on famous stamps may easily find their place in an 
encyclopedia, an extensive coverage of stamps seems outside of the scope of 
Wikipedia. So I would like to know what people think about that.

A few years back, I started a project on Savannah to offer data about postage 
stamps under a free licence, but with no success. Maybe a wiki would be more 
appriopriate. I have a MySQL database about French stamps to start with. 
AFAIK, there are no other project to provide data about stamps are under a 
free licence.

Articles about stamps obviously need an illustration with stamps scans and 
photos. But it seems that most modern stamps can be considered as artitic 
work and could therefore not be reproduce without the permission of the 
author.

cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Postage_stamp_thumb.jpg
AFAIK, the information provided on this page is wrong. This image can't be 
under a free licence. Can a lawyer can confirm or refute that?

I asked this here but got no answer:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_talk:Postage_stamp_thumb.jpg

Best regards,
Yann

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