German Gov't Donates 100,000 Images To Wikipedia 113
Raul654 writes "The German Federal Archive has agreed to donate 100,000 images to Wikipedia under the German version of the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License. These pictures cover a period from 1860 to present. This is the largest picture donation ever to Wikipedia, and possibly the largest in the history of the free culture movement."
Apparently, this is part of a project which will eventually make 11 million photos available for public use.
Nice (Score:3, Interesting)
With all the stories over various entities trying to screw everyone over fair-use, such as the one over a state claiming copyright [boingboing.net] over their written laws,, this is a nice change. What I like about creative commons is that it is one way for a content holder to hold on to their 'rights', yet allow the material to be used by the general public. This saves our culture being lost in the cellars of town hall or of those of some other 'IP owner'.
German speakers: help wanted (Score:5, Interesting)
For any German speakers out there: Most (all?) of these pictures lack English captions. I'm sure the people on Commons could use all the assistance they can get translating the German captions (especially into English). You can register an account on Commons [wikimedia.org] and help.
Also, props go to Wikimedia Deutchland [wikimedia.de], which arranged this donation.
that's one of the arguments being presented (Score:5, Interesting)
I can't say if it was a decisive factor in this particular image donation, but that's one of the arguments free-content proponents have been using to try to get other governments to open up at least some portion of their images: pointing out that since there is this large public-domain repository of US government images, if they want to promote their history and culture on par with that of the US, they need to provide us with a similarly high-quality, free-licensed collection of images.
Otherwise a large portion of generic examples are going to be US-based ones, simply because they gave us the images whereas other countries didn't.
Sometimes it leads to almost comical results, where dozens of other countries' leaders, ministers, and other figures are illustrated on Wikipedia by a photograph of them shaking hands with Reagan or Carter or Kissinger or whoever, because that US-visit photograph was freely released by the US State Department, while their photographs from back home are under a more restrictive copyright.
sometimes translation to German, too! (Score:5, Interesting)
Some of the captions are in need of being rewritten into a reasonable form even in German, especially older ones that are either out of date or hilariously biased. The worst are probably those that were apparently entered during World War II and never updated.
For example, this one [wikimedia.org] (which has in fact been updated), originally came with a caption that reads roughly:
Creative commons.. :-( (Score:1, Interesting)
While CC is far better than not available under any simple terms, it is far from ideal imo.
What if I want to use an image as a wallpaper (cropped, maybe gamma dimmed)? Do I need to provide a webserver where all the working versions of the image are downloadable?
Or if I use an image in a computer game? Where it's appearance dependes on the state in the game? What versions of the images do I need to give out? In any form as it *can* appear in the game (this could be thousands)? Must the game be released under CC as well?
Nazi Era (Score:3, Interesting)