Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-02-26/News and notes

The phrase "According to the WMF's Product Manager Fabrice Florin..." reads to me like you're implying the Wikimedia Foundation only has a single product manager. There is, in fact, an entire team of product managers, with each product manager having a focus on a different area. I'd instead suggest the wording "According to Fabrice Florin, the Product Manager for Multimedia at the WMF, ...". --Dan Garry, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 03:42, 28 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Thank you Dan, I've made the change. Ed [talk] [majestic titan] 03:46, 28 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Thanks! --Dan Garry, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 03:54, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

Let me just say this: DOWN WITH COPYRIGHT PARANOIA!. Thank you for your attention :) --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 05:12, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

Discussion is also active on wikimedia-l - David Gerard (talk) 08:21, 28 February 2014 (UTC)
 * “Supporters have also suggested adding a URAA-specific disclaimer to affected images that would warn US content reusers that they could face legal action.”: might be worth pointing to commons:Template:Not-PD-US-URAA. Jean-Fred (talk) 11:05, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

Ed, thank you very much for covering the URAA/Commons debate! As the primary author of Wikimedia Israel's letter, it was important for me to underscore that we're not fighting to save this or that particular image (except iconic imagery), but for the future of the way we handle images across all projects, as well as the future of all non-US Wikimedia chapters. This is why the issue is so important and many feel that it has been hijacked by a small number of people who are very active on Commons without enough input from the community as a whole. Hopefully this Signpost exposure will let more Wikipedians know of the issue at hand.

It is important to understand that for countries like Israel (and dozens of others) with shorter copyright terms, not allowing to upload these images could mean the inability to use any older images on Wikipedia ever, because the authors for most of these images cannot be verified in any reasonable amount of time. That is, it is impossible to know when the author died, and therefore the image theoretically cannot be used even 50 years from now. Having a generic law allowed us to use these images, and while there might only be a few thousands of them for Israel at the moment, if we're successful even in our current GLAM collaborations, we're looking at tens of thousands of others. I'm sure that if you combined all of the relevant countries, you'll get millions of potential images, wiped out in a rash decision.

As long as there's no legal urgency to delete the files (and according to the WMF, there isn't), I encourage everyone to leave them alone and do everything in their power so that more such free images can be uploaded in the future. —Ynhockey (Talk) 22:02, 28 February 2014 (UTC)


 * Yes, this is an important issue. The Golan v. Holder decision two years ago prompted a discussion over 30,000 words long, and the WMF's Board and Legal team have issued a number of statements about the issues and options we face (e.g. on the possibility of setting up Commons servers outside the US). Commons volunteers have been working since then to address the situation following the WMF's guidance, and have identified and deleted thousands of files (not hundreds) protected by copyright under the URAA. Many of these have been identified individually, while others have been grouped together with other images with a similar status (e.g. all the pages from a certain book, or all German postage stamps from a certain year). But there have been no mass deletions of the sort rejected two years ago, when it was decided that the circumstances of each image needed to be considered.
 * Open letters are great for bringing an issue to broader attention, but that in itself doesn't get us anywhere. Complex issues need the right sort of attention, and there seems to be more heat than light in the current debate, more confusion than clarity. When one of the letters (the one quoted in this Signpost article, from WM Argentina) is full of misconceptions about the issues, that only takes us backwards. I hope there will be no rash actions, like the proposed mass restoration on Commons of thousands of files that have been identified as copyright violations.
 * There are some options available to other projects that Commons cannot take, such as uploading non-free files under exemptions laid out in an EDP. Commons' policies regarding files that are free in some jurisdictions but not others could also be reconsidered. I encourage thoughtful discussion of such options. --Avenue (talk) 05:13, 2 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Cape Town is in South Africa. --190.134.118.96 (talk) 12:40, 4 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Thanks, 190, I'm not sure how I missed that. Ed [talk] [majestic titan] 15:27, 4 March 2014 (UTC)