[Wikipedia-l] Stamps, wiki and copyright

[Fred Bauder]

Certain articles lend themselves to philatelic coverage, for example,
Stellaland, after all, most folks who have ever heard of Stellaland first
encountered it with respect to its stamps. Illustrations of a few
representative stamps could be added.

A complete stamp catalog might be going a bit far, but if the energy is
around, which I doubt, it could be a sister project, Wikistamps...

If you take a photograph or scan a postage stamp that image is not
copyrighted even though the underlying design may be. Sometimes a nice
image, for example of a butterfly or bird or even a person can be included
in Wikipedia in that way. The Japanese stamp you reference is just a
photograph or scan of a stamp which anyone can make and publish, although
perhaps, in Japan, there might be some restriction as it is a Japanese
stamp.

It occurs to me that there is a sort of disconnect here. If you take a
photograph of painting in an museum or someone's home that is copyright free
but if you scan a reproduction of a painting in a book it is not, yet there
is very little difference in what you have done.

Fred

> From: Yann Forget <yann at forget-me.net>
> Reply-To: wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> Date: Fri, 27 Aug 2004 14:19:33 +0200
> To: wikipedia-l at Wikipedia.org
> Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Stamps, wiki and copyright
> 
> 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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