User talk:Alexis Jazz/Archives/2018/March

FYI

Re: Commons:Deletion requests/File:JogurtP1070447.JPG. You are probably right. That said, I dissent from the Commons:Project scope/Precautionary principle and favor the old meta:copyright paranoia, so while I respect your project wide activities in general, I can't say I consider such nominations and discussions anything but a waste of time, resulting in a deletion of a picture that is moderately useful, and would never generate any complain from the copyright owner, who doesn't know, doesn't care, and if knew, would likely consider it helpful advertising and would never consider complaining anyway. I also nominate some copyvios for deletion, but it is worth keeping in mind the usefulness/likelyhood to be sued ratio, and that PP is not widely enforced (consider the hundreds of thousands of FoP violating images we have, and how irrational is to delete them few every day, because some nobody wants to deal with mass nominations of those images... turning head the other way is the usual thing what happens when someone mentions this problem, through admins will usually delete individual images, which again is a waste of time, and good images... the only people who complain about them are not copyright owners, again, but the few holier than thou volunteers :> - I respectfully recommend that acting like one of them is not particularly helpful to the project). --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus ^Talk 06:35, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

@Piotrus: I generally agree with you. Not too long ago I tried (more) to be constructive. Then a picture that I needed was deleted without even following proper procedure (no DR), even though I had already removed all copyrightable elements from it. The admin just ignored my questions and comments, went ahead and deleted the file. That's about the point when I thought "can't beat 'm, join 'm".

But I am not nearly the worst you will encounter here. File:Mohsen Hojaji funeral in Isfahan.jpg was tagged for speedy delete and I have done what I can to save it. File:Farewell to Body of Martyr Mohsen Hojaji in Mashhad 01 (2).jpg was also on the shortlist for a possible DR or speedy, but I think that has possibly been avoided for now.

I would personally be happy to allow the full picture that is in the background of that photo. It would be hilarious if the author actually made a valid DMCA takedown request (which requires a valid address) for it. Within 4 minutes he will have his ass kicked by soldiers.

I have actually been thinking about starting a discussion for material for which we can be (as good as) certain that nobody can or will file a copyright claim between now and whenever the picture will enter the public domain. Cases of can would be when it's just not plausible anyone can provide any proof they are the author, like a bystander who is asked to take a picture with a camera that is not their own. But I'm not sure I will.

Enough about that, your picture. Companies can act strange. They might file a copyright claim for something like this. It's not rational. To allow it here, you would have to declare the biscuit stock photo is de minimis. I'm not convinced that's really the case here. The biscuits are on the lid which is the main subject. And if you remove them, the picture will be a lot less attractive - and possibly get deleted because it doesn't seem to serve any real purpose. That means the biscuits are not only part of the main subject, they are essential to the picture. A picture of just the biscuits would be in scope and more useful than a picture of the yoghurt cup in the grass with only text on top. But that's just my opinion. Showing a cup of yoghurt on a grass background is not ideal. The ingredients/nutrients section of the packaging would be more educational. Just another angle would have possibly shown more of the text on the packaging and shift the focus away from the stock biscuit photos. You could have also peeled away part of the lid. That would show some product while removing most of the biscuits from the image. For use on (for example) Wikipedia the only use I could think of is an article about peel-off lids. But for that, it can't be too hard to find a cup with peel-of lid that doesn't have any copyrightable elements on top. - Alexis Jazz 08:44, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

What I don't get is why we won't wait for said take down requests. We know they happen very rarely, and by not waiting for them we lose a lot of valuable content. Sure, we should respect copyright - reasonably. Like Facebook or Google and the rest of the net. Don't steal images, but enforcing the rules nobody cares... like FoP. FoP is a concept popularized by Wiki. For example, there is no FoP in South Korea. Do you think anyone outside Wikipedia cares about it? Koreans and visitors take pics of everything and share them like people in FoP countries. Nothing gets taken down... outside Wikipedia, when some rule enforces feels like nominating a few random pics (out of thousands we have, so we are not even being throughout). About the few pics you nominated - honestly, do you think anyone would complain about them over the next, errr, twenty years? Or a hundred? It is possible, of course. But I think less so than winning in a random national lottery :P Any time spent dealing with that stuff is IMHO time wasted. We can be doing useful stuff, like adding descriptions, for one example out of many :) Again, I've nominated some copyvio images myself, so I understand both sides, but the above sentiment represents my more recent views. Let's improve content, and not worry about preventing imaginary harm. Cheers, --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus ^Talk 15:01, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

@Piotrus: this is mostly not really about imaginary harm. Or real harm. Commons tries to be a library of free media. If we allow everything and only take it down after DMCA request everything will be fair use. And worse. You won't believe what can be found on archive.org if you know where to look. It's an extremely well kept secret only told to the most inner circle of the society of.. oh fuck it, Google will tell you.

The problem with that is not showing images. People may want to reuse them. Not just for personal use, but also for commercial or acadamic use. Even minor copyright violations may not be accepted in those circles. Okay, they may not care about your yoghurt cup. But there is just no reason to have those images on Commons.

I define DM a bit different from most Commons users, but I believe I am actually doing it the right way. I don't care how much of the surface of a picture is taken up by something copyrighted and whether or not it is in focus. In the most extreme (fictious, so far) case I could imagine an image that has 100% copyrighted content - while being DM. A partially transparant and rare mold has grown on a television screen. It is best visible when the TV is turned on, so the owner turned it on and made a photograph of this extremely rare mold, cleaned the TV (they had no idea how rare the mold was) and posted it to Commons. You see: 100% of the image is copyrighted, is in focus BUT is completely irrelevant to the actual subject. It also can't be replaced by a free image. I believe this hypothetical file should really, really be kept.

On the other hand you have an image like File:US Navy 100903-N-0933M-043 Chief Musician Devona Schiller, assigned to the U.S. Naval Academy Band appears on the Jumbotron as she sings the national anthem.jpg. The copyrighted bit may not be that big, but if you remove it the file will be useless.

Back to your yoghurt cup. I weigh a few things:

• Is the copyright violation the main subject?
• Would the image still have any value if this part was removed (maybe I remove it, maybe I just add DM - depends on how hard it is)
• Does the image have any education value?
• Is there a replacement available (or could it be made) that is just as good but without the copyrighted content?

I generally do not really care what the odds of a lawsuit are. Nor the size or focus of the copyrighted subject.

This is what I end up with for your yoghurt cup: the biscuits are at least part of what the main subject is. When they are removed (which I have done, so your image can be kept and is now actually free..) the image is not very useful anymore. It needs the decoration of the biscuits to have any value. When the copyrighted part is removed, does the image still have any possible educational function? Well I found that already questionable before I ate the biscuits. And can it be replaced? Most probably yes. This type of lid being hard to photoshop does not help. Had it been easy, perhaps I could have just swapped the biscuits.

Can you understand things like Commons:Deletion requests/File:US Navy 070820-N-0021M-002 Seabees from Naval Mobile Construction Battalion 7 Detail Chinhae, homeported in Gulfport, Miss., clear out logs from last year's mushroom harvest at Aikwangon Residence for the Mentally and Phy.jpg, Commons:Deletion requests/File:Adminpedia-image.png and https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Tawi_River_Jammu.jpeg&diff=289190997&oldid=289172713 bother me endlessly much more than a yoghurt cup that I've wasted too much time on?

I see you've adopted the Adminpedia image. Let me take this opportunity to shamelessly plug my version: File:Commonistrators - Now you see it.png. - Alexis Jazz 16:07, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

You make a good point about library of free media, but hmm. 1) we still have problematic images, so using an image from Commons right now is not a guarantee it is 100%, future-proof free. Btw, as an academic, trust me, nobody here (well, ok, almost nobody) knows much about copyright. From improper labeling, to the fact that non-commercial doesn't work for us... sure, copyvio is in theory not acceptable. But, well, that's theory. For years I've tried to get our local student presentations to use free images. Nobody cares, not the students, not the faculty I raise it too. Go to a random academic conference, and look at slides, images, attribution. Forget it, nobody cares. Sure, people understand copying a book is a crime, but in academia, people understand plagiarism, but don't really think copyright applies to them (of course, there are exceptions, top tier academics, publishers, etc.). But 99% i.e. your average academic? Nope. I am pretty sure it is the same in the business world. So what does this sad state of affairs have to do with us? Well, only that most academics are clueless why they have to jump through various hoops to upload content here, when they can do so without trouble everywhere else. I.e. they don't understand, just like your average person, why we make it difficult. Of course, we tell them, it is free media. You can reuse it. But, they reply - we copy and reuse everything, anyway, and nobody cares, nobody sues us. Of course I am aware of the exceptions, Aaron S., many others. But they are very rare. Free media is great in theory, but in practice, it is not needed much, because the copyright regime is annoying, but it doesn't enforce its limitations on most people. Wikipedia - we - are also annoying, because we self-censor ourselves, to nobody's benefit. We prove the point that copyright is annoying by being the only website that respects it :D

I appreciate the trouble you went through with the biscuits, particularly considering it is a pretty useless image. But I do think we SHOULD consider the likelyhood of being sued. When it is minimal, we are all wasting our time dealing with this, and I do feel sorry I've wasted your time, because both of us could spend it more productively rather than thinking about and fixing an image that nobody cares about, and whose potential to generate trouble for us/Commons is abysmally low. And yes

Yes, and I've voted on one. That's pure idiocy, but what I am bothered is is idiocy based on law. We should not waste our time enforcing it unless it becomes serious. Ex. I think we should of course pro-actively delete images/media which are copyrighted by companies/people who care about copyright, because, well, they sue. I.e. a photo from a stock photo company, or such. Not too mention we shouldn't host copies of movies, etc. :D But pro-actively deleting pictures that nobody cares about, ex. of an building in a country with no FoP, when most people there, including architects, don't know/care about it, is stupid. FoP (to focus on one example) should be only enforced in the few rare cases where someone cares and sues others (I can only think of the Eiffel tower lightwork example, and I am assuming it has resulted in some suits). Anyway, we have the entire cease and desist mechanism, people can complain, we can delete the images they ask for. Why do their job for them? What's in it for us? Sorry, the fact that we can claim to be a library of free media doesn't cut it for me, because, to reiterate at the end, we are not it, nor can we ever be, because we have many non-free media already. And whether we police our library a bit better or a bit worse will not change it. We can still call ourselves a free media library, and stop deleting images so proactively, and nothing will change except we will have a bit more pics, and annoy uploaders a bit less. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus ^Talk 11:37, 27 February 2018 (UTC)

@Piotrus: Now that the old revision of the yoghurt cup has been deleted I notice that I wasn't the person who nominated it. In fact, all I did was saving your picture! I need to pay more attention. - Alexis Jazz 11:34, 27 February 2018 (UTC)

Hehe, I messed up too :D Guess I was barking up the wrong tree... --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus ^Talk 11:38, 27 February 2018 (UTC)

In my utopian-Wikimedia Commons, all copyright violations are gone, and new uploads are checked against copyright law and policies in real time if they are to be kept or not. But that is not where we are today. We have a huge amount of real copyvios unfound, and a massive amount of would-be copyvios, such as logos above COM:TOO and COM:DW of COM:PACKAGING. To reach the utopian version of the Wikimedia Commons we have as a goal, to be a truly free media-base, we need to weed out all kinds of violations, both large and small. We Wikimedia Commons, exists for a reason. We are here to be a free media database. Not just a file storage place for Wikimedia, then we could simply upload directly to the Wikipedia; we instead have our own purpose and goal. We need to think of re-users, and their expectation (and not only the legal liability) of us having only free files. We want to be a project which hosts these free images, and ensuring that Commons can be their one-stop shop for finding these images. But keeping images known to be violations, simply because nobody will ever sue us, or because we will never get caught because of "reasons", is not doing our re-users a service. While we provide no legal cover for them for using our files, we should strive to to right by them, and only keep things which they can fully and legally re-use. That is our goal and purpose for existing. The fact that you, Piotrus, do not agree with the official policy COM:PRP - which is a fundamental policy which describes what this project is and should be and become - does not mean that the rest of the project should follow suit. You can argue that it is wrong, object to individual deletions, but this policy is the main foundation of what Wikimedia Commons is. We are a free media database, and should be so through-and-though, no matter legal liability calculations and possibility of consequences against us. --Jonatan Svensson Glad (talk) 18:50, 2 March 2018 (UTC)

We might not be perfect, we have a lot of violations lying around, but we should do every bit we can. One less violation, is still one less opportunity one of our reusers can get in trouble and be one small step closer to our end-goal of being a free media database/library. --Jonatan Svensson Glad (talk) 19:01, 2 March 2018 (UTC)

@Josve05a: You've given me some idea but I need to further work it out. Please remind me in a month or so if I forget. - Alexis Jazz 19:47, 2 March 2018 (UTC)

Regarding the deletion of the Maps

The maps that you requested for deletion [[1]] were created by us for general public use hence contains no copyrighted materials. The maps are just representation of the old and new administrative boundary of districts of Nepal and are hence helpful. By deleting these without any notice you have discouraged us from adding informative content to Wikipedia. We hope that you first message the user before deleting the content so that it doesn't put strain on time and effort. Regards Maze Solution — Preceding unsigned comment added by Kiran215 (talk • contribs) 02:56, 1 March 2018 (UTC)

I was going to tell you to go to the undeletion requests page, but you have already found it. Continue discussion over there. - Alexis Jazz 05:05, 1 March 2018 (UTC)

Please don't close your own withdrawn DR

Note: "Deletion requests must not be closed by the nominator that created them unless done before anyone else has contributed to the request." (from COM:DR) In the future, please just withdraw it and let an uninvolved admin review and close. An easy close like this one will not materially add to the backlog. Storkk (talk) 10:53, 1 March 2018 (UTC)

@Storkk: I didn't do anything wrong! @Jeff G.: had just told me I should close uncontroversial DRs (which this was) linking to Commons:Deletion policy#Closure. That page is considered official policy, the page you link isn't. And the official policy does not include that clause. If you want to propose a change to the official policy my talk page isn't really the right place to do it.

By the way, the only reason I did this was actually because a file mover was strictly following the rules and refused to rename the file because there was an open DR. Not wanting to wait for weeks for the DR to be closed and forgetting I had to rename the file, I decided to follow the policy that was handed to me and get rid of the DR myself. First I don't follow the policy and I get in trouble. Then I DO follow the policy and I get in trouble!! I find this really funny in a way. :-) - Alexis Jazz 16:22, 1 March 2018 (UTC)

I'm not accusing you of wrongdoing, I'm asking you to avoid doing something that leaves a confusing record behind and tends to appear non-transparent. For your reference, the discussion surrounding this can be seen here, where you will note that it is explicitly pointed out that this isn't policy. The fact that this isn't strict policy is not really relevant, however. Storkk (talk) 17:00, 1 March 2018 (UTC)

@Storkk: Okay. Why do you find the record left behind confusing?

And again.. I did it because a file mover refused to rename the file, not to reduce your workload. If you have a problem with that, consider taking it up with the file movers. I wouldn't have closed my own nomination if I wouldn't have had to. - Alexis Jazz 17:12, 1 March 2018 (UTC)

A withdrawn DR that appears deleted is inherently confusing, hence my edit to the archive to clarify. Secondly, by convention DRs are closed either Kept or Deleted, which aids bots that do statistics. "Withdrawn" is not really a result by itself. Storkk (talk) 17:21, 1 March 2018 (UTC)

@Storkk: For the fact that it appears to be deleted please contact administrator Jon Kolbert who moved the page without leaving a redirect. He did this after I closed the DR so I have no part in that. As for closing with either "Kept" or "Withdrawn", please instruct your fellow administrators to use the kept/deleted parameter of the {{DeletionFooter}} template. (I just looked this up so couldn't have done it when I closed the DR) I just copy what you guys do. You write the closing result in free text, I write the closing result in free text. - Alexis Jazz 19:29, 1 March 2018 (UTC)

We seem to be getting sidetracked into irrelevant red herrings. Rather than debating the finer points of how DRs are closed in general, I'm just asking you to abide by the consensus norm of not closing your own DR if someone else has commented. Thank you. Storkk (talk) 13:07, 2 March 2018 (UTC)

@Storkk: That's fine, I will. These are not red herrings though, I'm just explaining to you how you can prevent some of these cases in the future. As long as admins write "Kept" or "Deleted" in free text, there will every once in a while be someone who closes a DR by hand with a different message. If you don't want that, you can either complain to those people they are doing it wrong, or you can fix the template use. When you complain it looks as if the file is deleted, well it didn't when I closed the DR. Jon should have probably left a redirect, but he didn't. I'm not a file mover and I'm not Jon. And lastly, yeah, there was a comment.. One. By Jon. Who wanted to keep it (so not making the closure controversial in any way) and who, being an administrator, has fixed the whole thing himself.

You can complain to me about these things, but this will hardly make a difference. Your (and mine) time is better spent just fixing it. But as you don't seem to be interested in that, I guess I'll just have to go after these things myself. I already went after the file movers, so now I'll look at Jon and the templates. You're welcome by the way. Our goals are the same, we just have different views about the proper solution. - Alexis Jazz 14:36, 2 March 2018 (UTC)