2023:Program/Legal, Advocacy, and Risks/NNEULZ-How to free copyrighted media for Wikimedia?
Title: How to free copyrighted media for Wikimedia?
Speakers:
J. N. Squire
I’m an active contributor on the Wikipedia in French since 2009, and later on Commons and Wikidata. I’m also a member of the Wikimedians for Sustainable Developement User Group. I also translate a lot from English to French. I’m involved in technical and community discussions for preventing issues coming from bad accessibility, such as the huge redesign of the Main page on the Wikipedia in French (2017) or the transformation from Pages for Deletion procedure to Notability Debates (Débats d’admissibilité, 2021-2022) on the same wiki. I also bring some accessibility input to the team developing the Vector 2022 redesign. I also try to promote Wikimedia projects through workshops to people involved with local and reliable knowledge, such as libraries and associations.
Room: Room 310
Start time: Fri, 18 Aug 2023 15:50:00 +0800
End time: Fri, 18 Aug 2023 16:10:00 +0800
Type: Lecture
Track: Legal, Advocacy, and Risks
Submission state: confirmed
Duration: 20 minutes
Do not record: false
Presentation language: en
Abstract & description[edit source]
Abstract[edit source]
Many projects don’t use a fair use right to display “recent” copyrighted content that they would like to include. But many organisations have publicly available media. How to get them to licence them properly for us?
Description[edit source]
Do you want to see promotional images for a new notable movie or book on Wikipedia? You can’t.
Media helps promoting volunteer content from Wikimedia projects, and referencing them on search engines, especially pictures in Wikipedia articles. But most media that are under 70 years old are still copyrighted without any licence compatible with what we use (Creative Commons). It means that notable content can’t be illustrated properly, and projects have to work with mostly only public domain media.
More: copyright issues in the movement are mostly known through court cases, patrolling the projects to erase copyright violations, and lobbying in political institutions. Some projects use US “faire use” and local copyright exceptions to display some limited media anyway. But there doesn’t seem to be a framework of collaboration with organisations owning copyrighted content that is notable for free knowledge and Wikimedia projects.
However, a lot of companies and organisations spread promotional content for free without a free licence, such as press kits or official media. Some allows case by case requests, for example when a Wikipedia contributor asks them for illustrating a notable article. The movement even got free content from the World Health Organisation during the Covid-19 pandemic.
So how to increase the number of copyrighted media under Creative Commons-like licenses? Can we create a framework close to GLAM to free and notable copyrighted content, such as images ? How do we convince small and big copyright holder companies without betraying our own goal? What are they afraid of? How to show them that it’s worthwhile? Can we reproduce the success that Wikimedia had with the World Health Organisation?
Further details[edit source]
Qn. How does your session relate to the event themes: Diversity, Collaboration Future?
Some knowledge is currently unavailable for humanity (and Wikimedia projects) because they’re copyrighted. We need to organise between the various Wikimedia projects in order to exchange ideas and weight more to approach copyright holders with various cultures and policies. It would also help supporting small language projects that would like to have more attractive content and better search engine referencing.
Qn. What is the experience level needed for the audience for your session?
Everyone can participate in this session
Qn. What is the most appropriate format for this session?
Onsite in Singapore- Remote online participation, livestreamed
- Remote from a satellite event
Hybrid with some participants in Singapore and others dialing in remotely- Pre-recorded and available on demand
