Talk:Dwight Eisenhower
From dKosopedia
Has anyone worried about whether this drawing is either in the public domain or already subject to GFDL license? IMO this will be just as serious an issue here as on WP (Wikipedia). --Iks(TkPg) 12:53, 8 Jun 2004 (PDT)
- Well, it's not in the public domain, since the site being linked to says: "All artwork © copyright 1958-2002 Estate of Bernard Safran. Please do not reproduce or alter any of the images on this site without prior written permission. All rights reserved." So unless someone got that written permission... --Clang 13:58, 8 Jun 2004 (PDT)
Thanks for the due diligence, Clang; Wikis rely on lots of eyeballs, since no one can pursue all the issues they run across. In this case, i gave myself a pass from following that link. IMO this should be pursued further, with attention to two issues:
- I was terse about one issue, namely that getting "written permission" that satisfies the copyright holder does not let us include copyright-protected material: my understanding is we can only include what is
- explicitly put in public domain by donating all the rights to the world at large, or
- put under GFDL by the copyright holder, either
- by their adding it to a Wiki (which entails clicking on a button labelled with GFDL warnings), or
- by their otherwise executing a GFDL instrument that explicitly names the work.
- I was careless about the second issue, by neglecting to distinguish (in my own thinking) between including and referring to. They raise distinct issues:
- IANALB and I am not sure whether we can legally use the URL in a context where we intend it to get included in the user's browser's rendering of our page. WP may have resolved that issue to the satisfaction of someone qualified to judge what is and is not adequate, but I have not seen the evidence of that resolution. IMO, WP's free-wheeling decision-making style (which I greatly admire, and support, , BTW) may not be satisfactory for dKP, or capable of generating evidence of legal issues that is adequate for dKP.
- There is also at least an ethical issue here, perhaps a further and more subtle legal one: the link means we are avoiding burdening our server with the bandwidth of delivering the graphic, and evidently throwing that burden back on the copyright holder's server. WP gets prickly, not about others copying WP material and repackaging it (that's what GFDL is all about), but about others wrapping their ads and what-not around WP content, not by their server doing the merging, but passing a WP URL to the user's browser: doing that means that WP's server has to serve every one of their clients, rather than just serving their server when they make a copy that they use repeatedly. I don't know whether this is just ethically stealing WPs bandwidth, or whether it also has that legal status under plausible legal theories. If I owned dKos, I would want an answer to that that is better than I believe WP can achieve.