[WikiEN-l] Office hours for Friday, February 12

[Cary Bass]

Hey everyone!

On Friday, Office Hour will be hosted by Mike Godwin, Legal counsel for 
the Wikimedia Foundation, who you can read about at 


Office hours are from 2330 to 0030 UTC (3:30 PM to 4:30 AM PST).

If you do not have an IRC client, there are two ways you can come chat
using a web browser:  First is using the Wikizine chat gateway at
.  Type a
nickname, select irc.freenode.net from the top menu and
#wikimedia-office from the following menu, then login to join.

Also, you can access Freenode by going to http://webchat.freenode.net/,
typing in the nickname of your choice and choosing wikimedia-office as
the channel.   You may be prompted to click through a security warning.
It should be all right.

Please feel free to forward (and translate!) this email to any other
relevant email lists you happen to be on.

-- 
Cary Bass
Volunteer Coordinator, Wikimedia Foundation

Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate





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Re: [WikiEN-l] Images that are PD in their country of origin

[Carcharoth]

Oh, and a current example, if anyone is interested:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump#Picture_upload_question

One of the big problems is finding out whether copyright was renewed,
but I'm not sure if the artwork in question was ever published in the
USA anyway. People miss nuances so easily. And how on Earth do you
find out details of an artist called "David Barker"?

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Images that are PD in their country of origin

[Carcharoth]

On Wed, Feb 10, 2010 at 1:26 PM, David Gerard  wrote:
> On 10 February 2010 13:21, Andrew Gray  wrote:
>
>> I've sometimes thought that, in an ideal world, we should just phase
>> out PD-old and all its forms - it's often, as you say, wishful
>> thinking, or sometimes (and I know in my early days I did this) a
>> cover for a misunderstanding about just what the thresholds are.
>> So what'd we replace it with? Something functionally like...
>> {{copyright
>> |date=1895
>> |location=Germany
>> |author=anonymous
>> }}
>> ...and have it then spit out, well, "this image is free under German
>> copyright law (sect. 473 ii) and in the United States (Title 15, 7)"
>> or the like, with an option to click to have it generate a copyright
>> status in Canada or France or where have you. We do *have* this data
>> for a sizable proportion of our images, after all, and it's a bit lazy
>> when we take all this and slap a "well, PD, I guess" rubber-stamp on
>> it!
>> I doubt this is *practical* in the near term, of course, but it's a
>> thought. Any other ideas?
>
> I think this is a brilliant idea and would deal with the problem
> marvellously. And it should be reasonably easy to implement in an
> incremental manner without disruption.
>
> cc to commons-l - is there anything about this that'd be hard? Apart
> from going through a zillion images. The key point is it wouldn't
> disrupt anything existing.

The great thing about it, is that it encourages people to go to their
sources and find out what they *really* know about an image and its
origins and provenance, rather than just guessing and being an
armchair copyright lawyer. If you can find out something definite
about an image, and source it, then that is good. Though what to do
with "circa" dates, I'm not sure.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Images that are PD in their country of origin

[David Gerard]

On 10 February 2010 13:21, Andrew Gray  wrote:

> I've sometimes thought that, in an ideal world, we should just phase
> out PD-old and all its forms - it's often, as you say, wishful
> thinking, or sometimes (and I know in my early days I did this) a
> cover for a misunderstanding about just what the thresholds are.
> So what'd we replace it with? Something functionally like...
> {{copyright
> |date=1895
> |location=Germany
> |author=anonymous
> }}
> ...and have it then spit out, well, "this image is free under German
> copyright law (sect. 473 ii) and in the United States (Title 15, 7)"
> or the like, with an option to click to have it generate a copyright
> status in Canada or France or where have you. We do *have* this data
> for a sizable proportion of our images, after all, and it's a bit lazy
> when we take all this and slap a "well, PD, I guess" rubber-stamp on
> it!
> I doubt this is *practical* in the near term, of course, but it's a
> thought. Any other ideas?


I think this is a brilliant idea and would deal with the problem
marvellously. And it should be reasonably easy to implement in an
incremental manner without disruption.

cc to commons-l - is there anything about this that'd be hard? Apart
from going through a zillion images. The key point is it wouldn't
disrupt anything existing.


- d.

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Images that are PD in their country of origin

[Andrew Gray]

On 10 February 2010 02:58, Durova  wrote:

> But we keep getting editors who use the PD-old template anyway as an
> exercise in wishful thinking.  Too often, "the existence of a valid
> copyright is debatable" becomes a euphemism for "I've got a lousy source and
> haven't done enough research."

I've sometimes thought that, in an ideal world, we should just phase
out PD-old and all its forms - it's often, as you say, wishful
thinking, or sometimes (and I know in my early days I did this) a
cover for a misunderstanding about just what the thresholds are.

So what'd we replace it with? Something functionally like...

{{copyright
|date=1895
|location=Germany
|author=anonymous
}}

...and have it then spit out, well, "this image is free under German
copyright law (sect. 473 ii) and in the United States (Title 15, 7)"
or the like, with an option to click to have it generate a copyright
status in Canada or France or where have you. We do *have* this data
for a sizable proportion of our images, after all, and it's a bit lazy
when we take all this and slap a "well, PD, I guess" rubber-stamp on
it!

I doubt this is *practical* in the near term, of course, but it's a
thought. Any other ideas?

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk

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