Commons talk:Licensing

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This is the talk page for discussing improvements to Commons:Licensing.

For discussions of specific copyright questions, please go to Commons:Village pump/Copyright. Discussions that do not relate to changes to the page Commons:Licensing may be moved, with participants notified with the template {{subst:moved to VPC|Commons talk:Licensing}}.

For old discussions, see the Archives. Recent sections with no replies for 14 days may be archived.

Archived discussions[edit]

Seven 2006/2007 discussions organized as subpages, ignoringincl. comments added in 2014:

Violent explosion of screenshot licensing imminent?[edit]

A couple of months ago I figured that it will be nice to also add a screenshot representing a wiki to Wikidata thus enriching the respective wikis data set. Probably this is also nice for preserving the appearance of the wiki over time. I guess when looking at the licensing implications this good idea does not translate into good results.

Template Wikimedia project screenshot tells me: "To the uploader: Include always the authors and licenses of all images in the screenshot." That's basically impossible for most sites, even if it is a website/wiki publishing content with free licenses. E.g. the name is copyrighted, the logo and the screenshot may also contain copyrighted images or images are licensed with a license incompatible with Commons. What happens if the screenshot contains a screenshot etc. We are not even talking about text here.

Also if we assume we added all the information and licenses to the screenshot's pages, it appears that the screenshot is multi licensed which is obviously not correct. An easy example will be this file File:20200712 Screenshot MediaWiki.org.png only contains images of about 13 files. Also we know that WMF allows to depict their copyrighted logo etc. material for such cases, but for all other screenshots of foreign websites or wikis...

This is a melange of issues I am no longer capable to handle giving my legal knowledge. To me it looks like all up-loaders of screenshots similar to this one are basically "with one foot in gaol". I personally conclude that it is best to delete all of this. It will be nice to get an opinion on this. Perhaps there is even a policy I have not found yet, instructing me what to do.

Thanks for you comments. Cheers --[[kgh]] (talk) 08:56, 9 September 2020 (UTC)

I should add that image use on screenshots often falls under Commons:De minimis; therefore not requiring specific licensing information. As far as WMF logos are concerned, they are copyrighted but licensed freely, so that case is in general not problematic. ๐Ÿ™๐Ÿค๐Ÿฏ๐Ÿบ๐ช๐‘ค๐’†๐“‡๐Ÿท๐Ÿฎ๐Ÿฅ๐Ÿœ๐“บ๐”ด๐•–๐–—๐Ÿฐ (๐—๐—ฎ๐˜ญ๐™ ) 10:07, 9 September 2020 (UTC)