Re: [Wikimedia-l] Open letter from Wikimedia Argentina regarding URAA
On Sun, Mar 2, 2014 at 8:50 PM, Chris McKenna cmcke...@sucs.org wrote: You've missed the point. Commons is not at present a reliable source of media, Free or otherwise, because media gets deleted because once someone alleges that it is not free it gets deleted if the original uploader cannot prove it is free, regardless of the merits of the allegation. That's an odd view of the merits. The content should not really have been uploaded to begin with if the uploader couldn't show it was free. Commons has help desks to assist people who are unsure. The Foundation has said do not delete images that *might* be unfree under URAA unless there is a takedown notice yet the images continue to be deleted. I would take that complaint more seriously if people had identified deletions where the URAA status was not entirely clear, and complained about them. Instead the current proposal is that *all* URAA-related deletions would be overturned. The Foundation has not changed its position (expressed two years ago) that images which are clearly unfree under URAA should be deleted. This is entirely irrelevant to the attitude at Commons. English Wikipedia is Free according to the definition it uses, which is essentally Free for practical purposes as an Encyclopaedia and that is applied reliably. In contrast, Commons is arbitrarily and inconsistently Free and appears to be prioritising point making over being a practical media repository. You are free to disagree about en.wp's choices, but this does not excuse the attitude of Commons to the Wikimedia community. Modify that to Free for practical purposes *in the USA* as an Encyclopaedia, and you're getting closer. Commons should have a broader goal than that, though. Getting back to URAA-affected images, [[en:Template:Not-PD-US-URAA]] places images in [[en:Category:Works copyrighted in the United States]], which says we are currently trying to figure out what to do with files like this one. It's more than two years since Golan vs Holder, which seems a long time to be figuring this out. That's fair enough in a way, since image hosting probably shouldn't be high on enwiki's list of priorities. But contrast that with Commons, where the essential decisions regarding URAA were made (based partly on WMF Legal input) within 6 months or so, and substantial progress has been made towards implementing them, despite the much larger scale of the problem there (several thousand images, compared to 127 in [[en:Category:Works copyrighted in the United States]]). ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Open letter from Wikimedia Argentina regarding URAA
That would be wonderful. I imagine we would want to tag the images to indicate their copyright status in certain jurisdictions, and set up a mechanism so that projects can define which sorts of images they want to be able to embed in their local pages, and which they do not want (unless a locally EDP-compliant tag is attached). However, that wouldn't improve the URAA situation much. We would still need to delete clear infringements under the URAA, unless they are covered by some project's EDP. I guess it would at least reduce the number of transwiki transfers needed. On Mon, Mar 3, 2014 at 12:51 AM, Sam Klein sjkl...@hcs.harvard.edu wrote: On Thu, Feb 27, 2014 at 6:24 PM, Nathan nawr...@gmail.com wrote: Which led to the thought that hey, what we really need is a meta-project for hosting images that is *explicitly* intended to serve the other projects. We tried this before, right? But maybe this time we make the meta-project a technical implementation without its own community, where local uploads can be toggled to make files globally available without giving some global intermediary the right to turn that toggle off. I can see every file that is uploaded to any project being available via some global namespace. Commons as we currently imagine it could become the core set of maximally free images: those freely reusable in every jurisdiction. And there would be a separate threshhold for the rest of the images. Covered by at least one project's Exemption Doctrine and tagged as such; freely reusable in almost all of the world and tagged as illegal in one or two countries; c... ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Open letter on open letters (Was: Open letter from Wikimedia Argentina regarding URAA)
Look, I have no problem with the open letters from WM Venezuela, España or Israel. I might not agree 100% with everything in them, but they are generally on top of the issues, and they focus on the problems they law poses for us and our need for better solutions - all worth bringing to a wider audience. But the letter from WM Argentina is very different. It condemns the actions of certain Wikimedia Commons administrators who have deleted URAA-affected files (without naming them or linking to any of the relevant deletions), and makes various claims about how Commons policy and practice has changed and is inconsistent with statements by the WMF Board and Legal team. If you want to make these sorts of claims in an open letter, you should be ready to back them up. But WM Argentina cannot do so IMO, because many of their claims are untrue. Our practice is consistent with the WMF Board and Legal team statements, and it isn't true that the burden of proof has been inverted - the burden of proof has always been on those who want us to keep hosting a file. These sorts of mistakes could easily have been avoided if they had talked directly to experienced Commons editors first. I'm a Commons admin, but I'm fairly inactive these days and I don't believe I have deleted any URAA-affected files, so I don't think I am one of the certain Commons admins they refer to. But I do find defamation of hard-working members of my community offensive. If WM Argentina wants to respectfully call the Wikimedia Commons community to reflect on something, that does not seem the best way to start. On Thu, Feb 27, 2014 at 6:03 AM, Carlos M. Colina ma...@wikimedia.org.vewrote: Wait, aren't the chapters composed from people from the wikimedia community? Also, didn't you guys stop by a second to think the chapter thoroughly discussed the contents of the letter with its members, which may vote in favor or against publishing it? And if it is on Meta, is open to discussion, no? Finally, in Venezuela we say el que se pica es porque ají come. No need to take it personally if you are not among those certain Commons admins, right? Sent from Samsung Mobile ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
