Here's the deal: I'm writing something about images on Commons. This time, not penises.

Has anyone ever seen an example in a WP noticeboard or talkpage of WP insiders knowingly violating
copyright of an image? I bring this up mostly from having discovered a few admins who are
enthusiastically scraping Flickr, Photobucket etc. for images to post on Commons. They seem a
bit, um, sloppy about insuring everything they get is above-board.

Plus, the Corenbot is out of order. So, no one's checking, I guess.

Umm, what about pedophile-support specialist Derrick Coatzee and his theft of high-resolution images from the National Portrait Gallery in the UK?

Most of the porn that they suck off flickr (pun intended) is a copyright violation. You can always determine this by checking back as to whether the flickr account still exists a couple of months later. Flickr deletes all such accounts that they detect, and the reposting of commercial porn is one of the main causes for account deletion over there. Few of the genuine adult material posters there use Creative Commons. But you can ask on this group where most of the active ones hang out, whether there is a large number of genuine CC-BY-SA posters.
http://www.flickr.com/groups/unsafe/

Thanks for reminding me. Did you know that Coetzee has been keeping a list of his publicity?
What a twit. Probably goes around bragging about it.

There's a record of the "legal case".

I gather that the issue was "never fully resolved", the NPG appears to have decided to let it rest.
This was the trigger for the start of Britain Loves Wikipedia and GLAM.

I gather that "fair use" would allow use of digital photos if the copy was lower-resolution than the
original. Coetzee didn't take low-res copies, he took high-res. He's in the US and the NPG isn't.
The paintings are public domain, under UK law the photos aren't, but in the US they are.
What a mess. No wonder the case went nowhere, and no wonder the WMF is now "trying" to crack
down on copyright abuse.

I'm still not sure if admin image grabbers like Anetode are obeying the law 100% of the time....
they even have a bot to "generate non-free use rationales".