Commons:Deletion requests/Files uploaded by RuthAS
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This deletion discussion is now closed. Please do not make any edits to this archive. You can read the deletion policy or ask a question at the Village pump. If the circumstances surrounding this file have changed in a notable manner, you may re-nominate this file or ask for it to be undeleted.
Historical photographs of 1940s-1950s claimed as own works. Probably derivatives of originals with unclear copyright status.
- File:Miles M.57 Aerovan 1 G-AGOZ Air Contrs RWY 25.7.46.jpg
- File:DH.112 Venom NF.51 33010 RSwedAF Chester 1953.jpg
- File:Caudron C449 Goeland 1273 FAF RWY 15.03.47 edited-2.jpg
- File:Lockheed L749A G-ANUV BOAC BLA 10.09.55 edited-2.jpg
- File:Avro 685 York G-AMGK Luton 1952 edited-2.jpg
- File:Hillson Praga G-AEUT 1952.jpg
- File:DH.98 Mosq FB.VI TA379 69 Sq WI-T Cambrai 03.1946 edited-3.jpg
- File:Curtiss C-46D 4X-ALF El AL LHR 05.09.54 edited-3.jpg
- File:Douglas C-47A G-AJVZ Air Tpt Charter RWY 27.03.51.jpg
- File:Lockheed L-1049G D-ALAP LH RWY 06.05.56 edited-4.jpg
- File:Avro Vulcan VX770 VX777 FAR 13.09.53 edited-2.jpg
- File:HP.81 Hermes 4 G-ALDC Falcon Aws RWY 06.60 edited-2.jpg
- File:Avro 688 Tudor 4B G-AHNI BSAA WFD 30.04.49.jpg
- File:Scottish Pioneer CC.1 XL666 FAR 08.09.57 edited-3.jpg
- File:Scottish Avn A4.45 VL515 RWY 24.04.48 edited-2.jpg
- File:Miles M.14A HT3 G-AHNV WVTN 24.06.50 edited-2.jpg
- File:Mosscraft M.A.2 G-AFMS & G-AEST M.A.1 WVTN 17.06.50 edited-4.jpg
Яй (talk) 14:38, 8 August 2017 (UTC)
- Before you follow this presumption too far, you might want to look up the airliners.net user RAScholefield and contact her. For years she has been posting her aviation photography there, some of which dates back to the 1940s, and which was largely taken at airfields in the UK. More recently she has been graciously uploading some of her photos to Wikimedia Commons. It would be a shame to lose these valuable contributions due to a misunderstanding. --Colin Douglas Howell (talk) 18:00, 8 August 2017 (UTC)
- Thanks for the link - hopefully you can be realist enough to understand how old a person should be to take photos in 1929 [1] and upload those to Commons in 2017. While they may possess printed copies of those photos, that doesn't necessarily mean that they are the author / copyright holder. --Яй (talk) 19:15, 8 August 2017 (UTC)
- First of all, has that specific photo you just linked to also been uploaded to Commons? I can't find it here.
- Thanks for the link - hopefully you can be realist enough to understand how old a person should be to take photos in 1929 [1] and upload those to Commons in 2017. While they may possess printed copies of those photos, that doesn't necessarily mean that they are the author / copyright holder. --Яй (talk) 19:15, 8 August 2017 (UTC)
- Second, she does not claim to have taken that photo; that's what "Obtained over 50 years ago" means. Some of her photos she has uploaded on airliners.net were not taken by her, and are marked accordingly. That's not an unusual practice; some aircraft photographers collect not just their own photos but those they obtained from other sources, such as airline publicity departments.
- But the photos you have flagged range from 1946 to 1957. As I understand it, RuthAS is in her late 70s, and seems to have been born in England, so it is not out of the question that she took these herself; many photographers get started as children, and her earliest photos are of the quality you might expect from a kid with an inexpensive box camera. But they may also have been taken by a older family member; some of the oldest photos she has posted to airliners.net are marked "From a family album".
- I do realize that Commons needs to have clear evidence that works uploaded by users must not be copyright violations, for the sake of protecting Commons as a whole. And perhaps Commons will have to conclude that some of RuthAS's images don't have a clear enough record of copyright to keep.
- But absent evidence to the contrary, Commons is supposed to assume its uploaders are acting in good faith. An immediate statement that photos which a user has uploaded as their own work are "Probably derivatives of originals with unclear copyright status", without any evidence provided, would seem to be the opposite: assuming the user is acting in bad faith. --Colin Douglas Howell (talk) 02:14, 9 August 2017 (UTC)
- her late 70s? 1934, 1938, 1939. 2017-(1934-~20)=~103. --Яй (talk) 04:03, 9 August 2017 (UTC)
- Yes, I got her age from the original version of her user page, written in late 2008.
- her late 70s? 1934, 1938, 1939. 2017-(1934-~20)=~103. --Яй (talk) 04:03, 9 August 2017 (UTC)
- But absent evidence to the contrary, Commons is supposed to assume its uploaders are acting in good faith. An immediate statement that photos which a user has uploaded as their own work are "Probably derivatives of originals with unclear copyright status", without any evidence provided, would seem to be the opposite: assuming the user is acting in bad faith. --Colin Douglas Howell (talk) 02:14, 9 August 2017 (UTC)
- OK, there's no denying that she has been careless with attributing those. They obviously aren't her "own work", though the only hits on Google Images that I could find which didn't appear to be taken from Wikipedia itself were from her own web collections, either on airliners.net or abpic.co.uk (the Air-Britain photo library). "1934" I found on airliners.net and abpic.co.uk, both of which list it as a photo obtained "over 50 years ago"; "1938" I found on abpic.co.uk, which gives no indication of its source, and "1939" I found on abpic.co.uk, which lists it as "Obtained from Douglas 60 years ago". (I cannot judge whether the ages of those photos, depending on their sources, would qualify them as no longer under copyright, but that's a different issue.)
- RuthAS, I understand what a huge amount of work you've done to upload so many photos to Commons, but you must do your best to get the attribution and copyright status correct when you do so; if it's questionable, it would be better not to upload the photo at all. Otherwise you are potentially wasting your own efforts, since Commons would be quite justified in taking the photo down later. Worse yet, when you upload photos from your collection with boilerplate claims of "own work", and they turn out not to be, this puts everything you've done here in doubt. Wikimedia Commons is extremely vigilant in protecting itself from possible copyright infringement claims, which is why they put up all those warnings when you upload an image.
- Obviously I'd prefer that your images stay if they can. But problems like this must be resolved. Hopefully not too badly, for what that's worth. --Colin Douglas Howell (talk) 08:02, 9 August 2017 (UTC)
- I am now well into my eighties and have been taking photographs for almost seventy years, starting with box cameras, and now a cheapish digital model. I have tried to improve the photographic coverage of Wikipedia, by no means just aviation linked, but am now beginning to regret my efforts in the light of negative remarks by those "who may have wished that they were there" when I recorded those images. which were initially just for my own benefit. I've no intention of responding line-by-line. Sadly, most of my companions on the relevant dates have now passed on - and my patience nowadays is not limitless! RuthAS (talk) 15:35, 13 August 2017 (UTC)
- I'm not asking you to respond line by line, and I quite understand that you have limited patience and energy. Both my parents are around your age: my American mother being older, my English father (who himself had a career in aviation) somewhat younger.
- Do you understand what spurred my final comment? It was not the pictures listed in the original deletion request. It was these three pictures:
- You have to realize what the issue is here. It's certainly not a matter of jealousy or anything like that. I myself am very thankful for every one of the pictures you, and others like you, have captured and provided over the years, precisely because I could not be there. Work like yours provides the only possibility to share a bit of those experiences.
- Unfortunately, the problem is a legal one. Wikimedia Commons is intended as a repository of imagery that can be freely reused not just on Wikipedia, but anywhere else as well. This means it needs a set of ground rules to protect it from being sued by a copyright holder, in case someone uploads an image which they don't hold the copyright for. (As I understand it, this situation happens all too often.) One of those rules is that if you upload an image and claim it as your own work, which would mean that you are the copyright holder, then that claim must be correct. Editing the image, incidentally, is not enough to make that claim; copyright law considers that a "derivative work", and if the original image was still under copyright, the copyright holder's permission is still required.
- For two of the three photos I just listed, you yourself said on other photo-sharing sites that they were obtained from others (for the Kinner XRK-1 photo, from Douglas; for the Hawker Audax photo, you didn't say from whom). The third, the Hawker Demon photo, is at issue due to its age, being from 1938, so it's almost eighty years old and seems quite unlikely to be a photo you took yourself. If the Kinner XRK-1 photo came from Douglas, that means that Boeing may own the copyright on it, assuming that it was originally a Douglas-owned photograph. I do not know about the other two, but if their copyright status is in doubt, Commons must remove them to protect itself.
- That's why getting the copyright attribution correct is so important. Frankly, I hate this state of affairs where material which should have entered the public domain long ago remains locked up; this has only gotten worse in the U.S. as Congress has allowed copyright terms to be extended again and again. But that is U.S. law, and Wikimedia Commons must be in compliance with it.
- This whole situation upsets me; I can only imagine that you must feel a lot more upset.
- I'm not a Commons administrator, just an occasional user and uploader, so I have no real decisive power over this. The only reason I spoke up was because I happened to have your talk page on my watchlist, due to my interest in your contributions. I didn't expect things to turn out this way. Part of me regrets getting involved, because I fear that I have only made matters worse, but I couldn't ignore the situation in good conscience. At first I thought this was a completely unwarranted act and could be quickly settled, so my conscience drove me to act in your defense. But then this stuff turned up, and I had to be fair-minded.
- There's a modern expression for painful, no-win situations like this: "This is why we can't have nice things." :-(
@RuthAS: Thank you very much for coming here and replying. We all appreciate your help and generosity in releasing your own photos to the Commons. As Colin Douglas Howell explained, we just have some legal small print we have to comply with, because images which you obtained from elsewhere are probably not your copyright to license to us. Would you be able to tell us specifically which, if any, of the photographs you obtained from elsewhere and which ones you took for yourself? It would be very sad if we could not clarify this and some hand-wringing legal chap said that as a result the whole lot had to go. — Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 08:18, 14 August 2017 (UTC)
- Hello two kindly Gentlemen above! This modern litigious age seems to have left me trailing somewhat behind ... Of the longer list, all images are mine except the Mosquito TA379 which is from my father. Of the prewar trio, The Audax and Demon, taken at local airfields, are from small box camera prints in my father's family album. The Kinner came years ago via a deceased personal friend and believed originated from Douglas as it was in the background of one of their aircraft. Thank you for your help. RuthAS (talk) 09:21, 14 August 2017 (UTC)
- Thanks are due entirely to you, RuthAS. I am not experienced in our community judgements, but I think it would be OK to take it that you have, for the present purpose, inherited control over your father's copyrights in this and that his family album prints are his own. That just leaves the Kinner image with an uncertain provenance. I fear it will probably have to be removed, while I am hopeful that all the others will be allowed to stay. — Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 10:47, 14 August 2017 (UTC)
- Hello two kindly Gentlemen above! This modern litigious age seems to have left me trailing somewhat behind ... Of the longer list, all images are mine except the Mosquito TA379 which is from my father. Of the prewar trio, The Audax and Demon, taken at local airfields, are from small box camera prints in my father's family album. The Kinner came years ago via a deceased personal friend and believed originated from Douglas as it was in the background of one of their aircraft. Thank you for your help. RuthAS (talk) 09:21, 14 August 2017 (UTC)
Kept: per RuthAS's clarification and COM:AGF. Those three <1940 kept as {{cc-by-sa-3.0-heirs}}. --Sealle (talk) 11:32, 14 August 2017 (UTC)