On Sat, Apr 06, 2013 at 12:04:58PM -0400, Matteo Cypriani wrote:
> Thomas Preud'homme (CC'ed) and myself are currently packaging Salut à Toi,
> an XMPP-based communication system (see ITP #703659), and part of it is
> media files, including a French tarot deck.  This deck is of a classical
> design that corresponds to the Piatnik deck originally published by
> Piatnik & Söhne [P&S].

> The upstream author of Salut à Toi, Jérôme Poisson (CC'ed), picked the
> files on Wikimedia Commons, but they have since been deleted for copyright
> reasons [DEL].  Since the arguments were not very clear and Jérôme was
> convinced the design was old enough to fall into the public domain, he
> asked for an undeletion request [UNDEL] with some new arguments, but it
> was refused.  Subsequently, the remaining cards of the same design, such
> as [TN], have been marked for deletion on Commons.

> My questions are:
> 1. Can we introduce these file in Debian despite the decision made on
> Commons?

Wikimedia and Debian can make their own independent decisions about whether
they think a work is copyrighted.  Neither decision has any legally binding
force.

> 2. Do you have any advice for us to be sure that these images are in the 
> public domain, or that they're not?

1) upload, 2) wait for a copyright holder to step forward and claim
infringement and provide proof, 3) don't worry about it until then.

Since it's exceedingly unlikely that there is any copyright holder to step
forward, it seems reasonable to me to assume that these works are in the
public domain without presenting a pedigree that proves that they are.

-- 
Steve Langasek                   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer                   to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer                                    http://www.debian.org/
slanga...@ubuntu.com                                     vor...@debian.org

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