I'm sincerely confused.

Take a look at this lovely photo of the Atlantic City skyline.

Note that Wikipedia says of its use:


Note that Commons also lists the same usage conditions.

In the fine print, it says that the photo was obtained from:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/20801313@N00/1322602837/

On that page, the photographer has indicated that the photo is licensed "Some rights reserved", which if you click the link, it says:


The user who uploaded Bob Jagendorf's aerial photo of Atlantic City goes by "Chin tin tin".

What gave Chin tin tin the right to alter Jagendorf's license? How common is this misappropriation? Looking at Chin tin tin's talk page, it looks like he is a serial offender, but he's never been blocked.

The image is used extensively across popular Wikipedia pages. The photographer has indicated he doesn't want it being used commercially, but Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons say that it can be used commercially.

Someone explain this to me.

This is not unusual. As you know, I've uncovered a few administrators who do very little other than steal photos in this manner, usually with no regard for the owner's declared rights.

Have a look at Anetode (T-C-L-K-R-D) 's contribs. One could probably find a few copyright violations in some of the thousands of pics Anetode has put on Commons.

I've brought up the issue here.

I nominated the image but I am unsure if it was a mistake from the flickr reviewer or if the license was changed. I doubt someone would change a license from CC-SA-NC to CC-SA-BY. There is no real reason because they basically gave up their ability to make money either way (by allowing the image to go everywhere and thus remove the uniqueness/marketability).

The whole taking images from flickr should probably never have been deemed acceptable practice. There is really no way of proving images at flickr are the uploaders to license and flickr is absolutely sketchy.

It looks like the user changed his default license from CC-NC-BY to CC-BY on the 2nd of June 2009. Everything before then is CC-NC-BY everything after that is CC-BY.

Flickr does not change licenses retrospectively if you just change the default upload license. He would have had to reload everything into their organizer tool and reapply the licenses to the 1000 images uploaded prior to June 2009. He might not have known that was the case. Even if he did it would have be a pain in the arse as the process isn't easy when you are dealing with a 1000 images. You'd need to do it in several batches.

So for the above reasons I'd say that the license was always CC-NC-BY and was never retrospectively changed from CC-BY. OTOH given that he's now using a CC-BY license you'd probably think that he'll be OK with a CC-BY license on the rest too. However from his flickr profile:



which indicates that he probably doesn't understand the licenses.

As the FlickreviewR bot shows, the licence was fine at the time. And irrevocable.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?t...&oldid=10878600

So, back at the time of upload, Jagendorf had allowed for commercial reuse, then (presumably) he changed the license on Flickr? That makes sense. I've contacted Jagendorf to see what he might say.

The guy doesn't appear to understand the licenses. But then I don't expect some wikipedia thief to understand much either.

If he didn't understand the license, then he didn't actually offer the license, and anyone who has used it since is doing so not by license, but instead as an innocent infringer. This means you can't be sued for infringement, but have to stop upon actual notice from the copyright holder. In any case, such reuse without the artist's consent is immoral and unethical even if legal; it is abhorrent to disrespect the artist's wishes merely because s/he did not understand the consequences of a dropdown box on Flickr's user interface.

Commons ought to delete the images, if nothing else because it's clear that the copyright holder did not intend to release those images under an unlimited reuse license. They won't, though, because Commons is run by a bunch of jerkish assholes who are out to collect as much porn (and incidentially other stuff) as they can.

Sigh.

Now the discussion is getting flooded by a small group of people who think flickrreviewbot is infallible and don't get that it has had a lot of problems recognizing which page is the right page and thus has a significant chance of identifying a license from another page as the page in question.

That is in addition to bot problems in general.

The bot is so buggy it even had to be blocked in 2008 to stop mass destruction, and just think about the amount of problems that probably went unnoticed. So basically, these people want to keep flickerwashed images because a bot that produces major amounts of false positives gives them a cheap excuse to saying something no one can actually prove either way.

That isn't good at all.

I vote for this to be the WMF's new motto.

And I vote for what Kelly said. More descriptive.

If anyone has some free time, compare the flickreviewerr bot with the licenses on flickr. See if there are any that don't match up from the past couple days. If there is at least one, that would be enough to toss out all of the flickr reviews from the bot.

It would not prove anything. It would likely be someone who had read your request here.

Really? Because the bot has major errors and always has, and it has a proven problem with determining what the right page to view is.

I like how you worked out a logical loop that would ensure as much copyright infringing material as possible is put into Commons. Are you doing this to troll Commons? Commons's core policy says we are to remove images if there are any doubts to its copyright status. Why are you trying to undermine that?

Vintage Ottava. Good to see the boy back on top of his game.



Major errors!
Proven problem!

Amazing that no evidence of these errors/problems are ever forthcoming from Ottava as he makes these dire assertions.



TranslatedFromOttavaToEnglish: I am soooo much smarter than you. I see what you're doing there.
Reality: I, Ottava, am a strange conspiracy fetishist.



TranslatedFromOttavaToEnglish: You didn't agree with me RIGHT THE FUCK AWAY. YOU. ARE. EVIL.
Reality: coo coo, coo coo



TranslatedFromOttavaToEnglish: I must show everyone else that ... YOU. ARE. EVIL.
Reality: coo coo, coo coo



TranslatedFromOttavaToEnglish: I am going to be reasonable. I wish I had a friend so I could do the good cop/bad cop thingy. So alone.
Reality: I am making shit up all over this place.



TranslatedFromOttavaToEnglish: PHEAR ME!!!1oneEleven!
Reality: I am banned from almost every project I have ever done any work on. I am a giant fucking loon with no prospects in real life. I need to feel good about my power some-fucking-where. Let it be the wiki...

Vigilant, darling, you're wasting too much time on Ottava. He isn't worth it.

Ottava, how do you propose Commons verify Flickr licenses, given that a Flickr user can change a photo's license at any given time, yet Creative Commons licenses are irrevocable? You don't trust robots. You don't trust other humans. Do you want to ask God or the pope to review Flickr images instead?

There is a big FAIL with the CC licenses. The problem being that a large number of people that use them on flickr don't actually understand what they are doing with them. The help forum on flickr and the various licensing groups get a number of whines each year about how some one has 'stolen' their CC-BY licensed photo and put it on some website. Well DUH! Then they proceed to switch them all back to All Rights Reserved. Sometimes they'll add a CC license to one specific upload and forget to turn it back to ARR afterwards.

Now you'd think that it would be just a few dummies that misunderstand, but you even get it on wikipedia notice boards and the mailing lists that someone is using a WP page, or an image that they uploaded to WP, commercially.

And just this last week I've seen a bunch of fuckwits on foundation-l whining about a 5 second shot of a WP page in a film. Which is in the context is probably a fair-use anyway even if WP pages were ARR.

Then you have Scott-Mac whining about NPG stealing his copyright work which he cut and past from some other sources.

So basically taking a CC license at face value is worth what you pay for them, they are added to stuff by people that don't have a fucking clue, and not having a fucking clue probably means that the license isn't valid in the first place. You really ought to take a CC license on flicfkr as no more than an advertisement that its usage is probably OK, but you won't actually know until you actually ask.

The commonly repeated assertion that "creative commons licenses are irrevocable" has no legal justification. The only blackletter law on the revocability of licenses requires that the licensor receive consideration from the licensee in order for the license to be irrevocable. Absent consideration, the license is revocable. No court has ever ruled that a CC license is irrevocable; given that, and given that there does not appear to be consideration exchanged as part of a CC license (that is, no contract is formed), I continue to be of the belief that a CC license is revocable and may be revoked at any time, by actual notice of such revocation from the licensor to the licensee.

This position is unpopular with Free Kulture Kreeps, because it undermines their belief that they can misappropriate other people's content whenever it amuses them. But I've yet to hear a cogent legal argument why I'm wrong.

Very interesting Kelly. I was just reading on the CC website where they state the licenses "are not revocable in the absence of a breach".

Aside from the question of whether these licenses are revokable or not under normal usage, I wonder how often Wikipedia breeches these agreements. I've see editors at commons re-upload an image under their own name with no attribution and ignore requests to attribute. Then there's text that gets moved around making it difficult or impossible to see who the author was.

It's funny how few times an actual copyright attorney has addressed Wikimedia's little issue.

If you do searches for it, you find stuff like this--in which people advise each other to take
photos from Commons, because they're "free". And here's an attorney recommending the use
of Commons photos, for the same reason.

The biggest dispute to date is still the National Portrait Gallery business. There's now a WP article about that,
however embarrassing it was to WP. It's a stupid dispute, it crosses national boundaries (thus making it even more stupid),
and it's never been in front of an actual judge or jury, so there's no decision. But at least the article shows some prior case law.

Commons has yet to receive a serious legal challenge to its practices. Pro or semi-pro photographers posting on Flickr
obviously don't have the money to pursue a copyright lawsuit against Wikimedia -- it will probably take a major
corporation's involvement. In the US, in a US court. Until then, Commons gets away with (very quiet) murder.

The WMF is taking a risk by allowing this to continue. Not that anyone cares, of course.

That may change. The copyright office is looking at ways to allow small copyright owners to leverage the courts.

Let the gnashing of teeth begin.

My problem with Commons, and with the Creative Commons in general, is the way both encourage people to release their works under licenses without being certain that the licensors understand the terms of the licenses they are being asked to release the works under. Bullying people to give up their rights, because you don't think it's fair for them to have them in the first place, is simply odious.

I support the right of artists and authors to release their works under the terms of whatever license they want. I do not support the right of anyone to bully artists and authors into giving up their rights for the sake of publication, and any legal rights acquired in such a manner should be treated as illegitimately acquired, ethically and morally if not legally.

Meanwhile, over at Wikipedia we have Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Incidents#Mass_deletion_of_free_license_tags.

I already proposed it - keep a cache of the page or a screen shot at the time it was reviewed. Flickr doesn't. Google doesn't. No one does.

You know that link won't work in a couple of days, right?

Howzabout this'n?

Meanwhile, Ottava is trying to get me banned at Commons because I voiced doubts about the copyright status of some of his uploads:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?t...y_Pieter_Kuiper

Thank you, Ottava, it will strengthen my position there.

Where do we keep these screenshots? Upload them to Commons, too? Woo, let's add thousands of useless non-free images to Wikimedia's servers. Totally helpful in 99% cases, y'know?

I think that Commons has deleted images when the copyright holder claims that he/she didn't understand the terms of Creative Commons licenses, despite the confusing revocability issue.

The problem is that with the Internet, people feel free to reuse pictures and plagiarize and whatnot where they please because somehow... people are stupid that way.

Wikipedia's made a half-assed attempt to make the licenses clearer at this template but that's not displayed to every uploader. I hope that OTRS is making licenses clear to the people they deal with, but who knows.

This also brings up the suggestion of Wikipedia using other "restrictive" licenses, for example the noncommercial or no-dervatives CC ones. There are many more people using these on Flickr than the ones allowed by Wikipedia, yet if they want their images to be used by Wikipedia, they'll have to change the license, and probably without understanding what it means. Some prime examples are here:



It doesn't even mention commercial use (or define "share") but points you to a long page of text. Many of the other example requests - which have actually been sent to people - are filled with silly phrases:


And some brighter bulb put this one in:

There were a couple of arseholes on the Creative Commons mailing list a year or so ago whining that flickr should rename CC-BY-SA as "License for Wikipedia".

OTRS is a pretty solid place. And cached copies of pages are kept by tons of different groups, especially Google. No one has said that it violated copyright law to do such.

Even if you have a certified timestamped copy of the license that still doesn't prove that the flickr uploader has the copyright to the image and thus the legal rights to assign a license.

If someone puts a bug photo of mine on flickr with a CC-BY-SA license, some dweeb then uploads it to wikipedia, wp takes a capture of the license, and then Monsanto uses it in some ad campaign, its Monsanto that I'm going to go after as they have the money, and they should have performed the due diligence before reusing. Every publisher I've dealt with has always wanted a statement that I own the Copyright.

The CC-BY-SA license is only taken at face value by freetards most commercial outfits, will double check the license with the copyright holder.

Agreed. My proposal was merely to solve the problem regarding what Mr. Kohs points out - if the creator has changed the license or if Commons was merely lying about the original license.

No, it is not. It is a secret place, we cannot see what they are doing. The claim in the OTRS ticket that "permission has been verified and archived" is a joke. They have lost permissions (the backup was also deleted when someone made a mistake). But the real problem is the claim of permissions being "verified".

As an example we can take the OTRS agent and former Foundation employee Cary Bass aka Bastique, see http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:...ca_Maxima_2.jpg

There is also Cirt verifying anti-scientology uploads: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:...:Lisa11-big.jpg

Also, some privileged uploaders have wholesale permission to upload anything, without anybody verifying anything, see http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Emi...Southerly_Clubs which is included in hundreds of uploads. But when someone modifies their uploads, they issue vehement protests http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?t...2650#User:Ahkka

Removal of a DRM is a criminal offence under the DMCA regardless of copyright status. Remove "Southerly Clubs" at one's peril.

There was a proposal to do that, or something similar about 4 or 5 years ago. Some one was going to set up a system where a re-user would pay $10 for a timestamped recording of the status of the license. It fell apart because CC users on flickr were opposed to the scheme. Personally I never saw the problem as the charges were being placed against the license not the work. But it did cause a lot of heated arguments.