> > Have you identified any items for sale which are from Wikimedia > projects and not clearly marked as being in the public domain? >
Part of the reason for notifying the list was to alert other Wikimedians to that possibility. > > Luckily the ebay items have sufficient metadata that we should be able > to track them all down. A big job, but worth doing. > > > In his eagerness to construct a strawman, John Vandenberg ignores all > these > > factors. This is one reason why the pool of featured picture > contributors > > is small. > > You started this thread with "An eBay vendor is exploiting a volunteer > restoration of the Holocaust." and "Going through their online store > revealed a dozen more of my restorations > for sale, all without credit." > > Obviously I assumed that you were concerned that you and other > restoration volunteers had some moral rights being violated. > My apologies for that assumption. It was a cop-out for me to say that > faithful restorers have no moral rights. I wouldn't go as far as to > say I was being simpleminded, but I am a bit biased in that regard. > > As I am shocked to learn that I am somehow partly responsible for the > pool of featured picture contributors being so small ... I'd better > pick up my act and help identify the creators of these works and look > for cases where moral rights have been violated. > A number of our featured picture photographers have been complaining for a long time. Recently Wikipedia's most prolific FP photographer retired after five years' and 164 featured pictures' service, due in part to the reactions of text editors that range from apathetic to hostile when media contributors express concerns over exploitation. One of our featured picture photographers discovered her work in use in a commercial advertisement, in violation of license and entirely without credit. Several months ago I wrote to this list after discovering that my restoration of US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis was being used uncredited by *Time* magazine. To date, no one has joined my letter writing campaign to contact the magazine. The magazine still isn't replying to email. The Louis Brandeis restoration was 20 hours' labor. Extensive staining and chemical damage required careful reconstruction including large portions of his face. It is, likewise, shocking to encounter a senior editor--an arbitrator no less--who calmly presumes such work entails no creative input and no share of authorship. If *Time* were to plagiarize a text editor the matter certainly would be taken seriously. The Brandeis restoration is also among the items exploted by this eBay vendor. Our pool of talented media contributors is not deep. Wikipedia has exactly one FP photographer from sub-Saharan Africa, who has expressed similar complaints. Much of our best visual content is location-specific: cityscapes, landmarks, and species can seldom be transmitted via interlibrary loan. If it doesn't shock you to see even the Holocaust exploited then I'll shake my head and move on. It isn't easy to expand the volunteer pool under these conditions. But a new group of high resolution images arrived from the Tropenmuseum today; when one door closes another one opens. -Durova _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l