[Wikipedia-l] Re: image copyright

[James D. Forrester]

On Thursday, 19th February 2004, at 07:46 (GMT), Delirium wrote:

> Michael Snow wrote:
> 
> > Jimmy Wales wrote:
> >
> > > I would strongly prefer that people not post images to wikipedia
> > > with permission *just* for Wikipedia.  We're a GNU-free project,
> > > and we will always remain such.

Sadly, this ideological point of view, though it I would like to
follow, is sadly a rather unworkable one, as SecretLondon and others
have pointed out, as most of the useful images (for a small cross-
section, at least) we have are unusable.

> > Special:Upload should have a much more obvious statement of this
> > than merely a checkbox for "I affirm that the copyright holder of
> > this file agrees to license it under the terms of the 
> > [[Wikipedia:Copyrights|Wikipedia copyright]]." It ought to have a 
> > warning similar to what shows up below the box on an editing page, 
> > without the stuff specifically oriented to text. Like this:

[Snip]

> > Can we get this change made, please?

Sounds like a good idea, certainly.

> I think this change should be made together with the change to 
> categorize images, because with that change it'd be impossible to
> upload fair use images without lying when you click the box. I'd
> certainly support a change that had:
> 
> [] This image is in the public domain
> [] I am the copyright holder and license this image under the GFDL.
> [] This image is licensed under the GFDL by ___
> [] This image is licensed by ___ under the following 
> more-permissive-than-the-GFDL conditions: ____ (e.g., 
> BSD-style license 
> or something)
> [] This image is claimed to be fair use, with the following 
> rationale: ___
> 
> And then a warning that if your image does not fall under one 
> of these 
> options, you cannot upload it.

I think we should also have an option of:

  [] This image is otherwise licensed for Wikimedia by ____ under the
     following terms:

... possibly with a set of sub-options, like:
      [] non-distributable   [] sub-distributable
      [] non-commercial      [] non-profit sales only
      [] licenser credited 
      [] image unchanged
      ... &c.

A point that seems to be being ignored is that fair use is not at all
applicable outside of the US; given that a major reason that we're
doing this is in preparation for Wikipedia 1.0 for **international**
release, I think that we should bear in mind that we'll have to junk
every such-sourced image for it anyway - we will be required to carry
different flavours of the release depending on use and territory;
having another category, such as this one, is not a significant
further burden, IMO.

Yours,
-- 
James D. Forrester
james at jdforrester.org | csvla at dcs.warwick.ac.uk | jdforrester at grovewood.org
jon at eh.org | jamesdforrester at hotmail.com | james.forrester at orange.net