Three days ago, the ‘Share A Fact’ feature was announced in the Wikimedia blog. Unfortunately, the pictures created by this feature do not contain any attribution concerning the background image. As most of the free licenses used on Wikimedia Commons require attribution, this feature misleads the users to commit copyright violations. Therefore it should only images which are in the public domain (or licensed with CC-0) should be used as background images. If no public domain image is available for an article, a neutral background could be used.
Description
Description
| Status | Assigned | Task | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stalled | None | T95092 Only use public domain images for the Share A Fact feature | ||
| Resolved | Deskana | T95378 Add support to PageImages for finding a freely licensed page image |
Event Timeline
Comment Actions
I'm afraid we're not going to do this, as it would significantly degrade the quality of the feature.
Please note that the Wikimedia Foundation's Legal Team have assessed this feature and given it full legal signoff.
Comment Actions
@Deskana Could you please provide the rationale provided by the Legal Team? If not, who’s the contact person regarding this issue?
Comment Actions
@Ireas Stephen LaPorte is the liaison between Legal and Product/Engineering, so I would reach out to him about this.
Comment Actions
Using this feature with CC-by-sa 3.0 pictures in Germany is according to a judical decision of a German court illegal. That´s why it isn´t acceptable to decline this task.
Comment Actions
Here you can see the judical decision: [http://bilderklau.lucan.de/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/LG-M%C3%BCnchen-I-37-O-9798-11-Endurteil.pdf
Comment Actions
Thanks for the report. Legal blockers obviously supersede almost all other kinds of issues, including product decisions. That said, only WMF-Legal gets to decide what is and is not a legal blocker. Obviously, they will consult with outside counsel specialised in other jurisdictions where necessary.
I will contact the Legal Team about this task.
Marking the task as stalled for now, since it cannot be acted on until then.
Comment Actions
@MGChecker I no longer work on the mobile apps, so I wouldn't know. @Slaporte would be the best person to ask, as he was the person in the Legal Team that I handed this off to.