Proposal:Keep the contents legal

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Request for Discussion / Sign-Ups

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Summary

The Foundation should not only protect itself from legal challenges.

The Foundation must also help the users and the reusers to protect themselves.
The Foundation must also help the users have their rights respected by the reusers.

The Mission Statement of the Foundation must reflect this or some of its keywords (disseminate [contents] effectively - useful information) receive an interpretation favourable to legality.

Proposal

Address how users can help themselves remain legal before or when a new wiki or a major new software is created
Address how users can help themselves remain legal when a partnership with an outside partner providing contents is made by the Wikimedia Foundation or one of its chapters
Address how users can be certain that their legal concerns are addressed when a partnership with an outside partner reusing contents is made by the Wikimedia Foundation or one of its chapters.

Verifiability of copyright information

We need to give a definition of what we mean by accurate copyright information. As we provide files "as is" with a no-guarantee disclaimer (commons:Commons:General_disclaimer), we ought to provide the reuser with the available evidence that a file has the claimed copyright status, so that the reuser can make his own mind, his own assessment of the evidence.

So in fact most of what en:Wikipedia:Verifiability says about the verifiability of encyclopedic texts applies mutatis mutandis to the verifiability of copyright claims.

commons:COM:OTRS must define procedures to ensure that the OTRS is not only a place to store a variety of unverified claims, but a structure which makes copyright information verifiable.

Family photos : add a new section for family photos in commons:COM:CB, defining the requirements for the identification of the photographer and defining the requirements to ensure that all copyright owning family members agree to the free licensing release.

Corporate copyright ownership : (to be discussed) should not the minimal requirement be the disclosure of the photographer's name ? Should not a well-managed company keep a track of its employees' names or of its contracts with private photographers ?

Already published contents (books or photographs) : (to be discussed) should not the minimal requirement be the disclosure of all previous publications and (or?) a statement that the previous publication(s) was(were) non-exclusive ?

Contents created by children

Do we accept free licensing proposals by parents offering to sign in behalf of their children ?

My view is that we shouldn't and that we should only accept contents created by people some time ago when they were little children, making sure that they are 18 years old or older at the time they give their consent to the free license release. (or 16 : to be discussed)

Hotlinking and privacy

The commons:MediaWiki:Gadget-ChooseResolution.js gadget, which provides help to website owners wanting to hotlink pictures from Commons, should provide a link to http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Privacy_policy alongside with the copyright information, so that the Californian law (and similar laws of other jurisdictions concerning privacy), is respected (post a distinctive and easily-found link : en:Online Privacy Protection Act.

Motivation

Read this (Melanie Schlosser, "Unless Otherwise Indicated: A Survey of Copyright Statements on Digital Library Collections", College and Research Libraries", v.70(4), p. 371-385 (July 2009).)
My experience on Commons.
Remember what was said about wikiquote (I'll try to find the link).
The agreement between Wikimedia and a French telephone company (I'll try to find the link)

(to be expanded)

Key Questions

Draw the lines between the safe contents, the unsafe contents, and the grey zone between the two. (I'll try to draw a little graphic here)

Build consensus.

Address the concerns of the "stop copyright paranoia" group.

Potential Costs

Some disappointment/disapproval among some users
- Those who don't want to protect themselves and think it is their life and no other people's business, and a fortiori, who do not want to protect others.
- Those who thought any black and white picture is old, therefore in the Public Domain

The loss of the copyrighted French murals on Commons (if this was ever considered as being an asset)

To be discussed : should the Foundation finance totally or partially legal councel when some specific users or user groups are under legal threat ?

To be discussed : should the Foundation finance legal advice concerning not its own safety (I take it for granted that the Foundation will anyway seek legal advice concerning its own safety) from legal challenges, but the safety of the users, proactively, before a new project is started ?

Part of the Ford Foundation grant could be used
- to develop file reviewing tools on Commons
- to develop a picasaweb upload bot (whose purpose is to keep a record that the file was licensed under the specified license at the time of the upload, even if the user there eventually changes his mind or deletes the file)
- to solve the problem of files free in one country, unfree in another

Some spending could consist in asking lawyers from the local countries from where it is most difficult to find accurate information in English on the web (for example VietNam) to verify or expand the contents of commons:COM:FOP or Commons:Commons:Licensing#Country-specific_laws.

Some spending could consist in asking a lawyer to help write down a Maps & the law FAQ.

References

see #Motivation

Community Discussion

I put it in both categories for now. Even redefining the Foundation's functions this way is still reforming policy and governance. 99.35.128.135 18:06, 20 August 2009 (UTC)

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