File talk:Fraternity monument Erdenet.jpg

 

Watermark vs. copyright notice

Sorry, but Fiable.biz is the name of the company who took the photo, and this image is not in the public domain, it's provided under Creative commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license which specifies (4.c) "You must, unless a request has been made pursuant to Section 4(a), keep intact all copyright notices for the Work and provide, reasonable to the medium or means You are utilizing: (i) the name of the Original Author (or pseudonym, if applicable) if supplied, and/or if the Original Author and/or Licensor designate another party or parties (e.g., a sponsor institute, publishing entity, journal) for attribution ("Attribution Parties") in Licensor's copyright notice, terms of service or by other reasonable means, the name of such party or parties;". So nobody is free to remove the name of the company "Fiable.biz" who took the photography. Moreover, the author name is worldwide protected by the Berne convention, so that erasing it is illegal. It'd be strange (and, in some countries, illegal) to delete Rembrandt's signature from his paintings, wouldn't it? I'm the one who took the photo, not the one who transloaded it here. Feel free to erase the photo from here if you wish, but not to delete our name. --Henri de Solages (talk) 01:44, 12 July 2009 (UTC)

It is correct that copyright notices must be preserved. But you might want to inform yourself about the formal requirements for a valid copyright notice in the country where you published the image first (the US if the first publication was on flickr). Usually, the required format is "Copyright <year> <copyright holder>", where it is necessary to either spell out the word "Copyright" explicitly or to use the © symbol. An internet domain address written on an image is NOT a valid copyright notice, and enjoys no protection. Copyright information was supplied outside of the image in the statement that you are the author, and this information is correctly preserved on the image description page here. Since that domain name is not a copyright notice, removing it simply means that a derivative work is created, which is clearly permitted by the license. Please remember that the license is a contract that also binds you, and that your attempts to prohibit legal derivative works are a violation of that contract from your side. You might also want to check out the Commons policy on watermarks for comparison. --Latebird (talk) 18:44, 3 September 2009 (UTC)

• Firstly the © sign is not required any more since the Berne convention came into force in the U.S.A. on 1989-03-01,
• secondly, how auto-centred Americans may be, Wikimedia is not only a US publication but a worldwide publication,
• thirdly, the Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license we granted explicitly protects "the name of the Original Author", not just US-style copyright notices. --Fiable.biz (talk) 01:18, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

There is now an OTRS ticket, 2009092610001971, about this. My reply there: "As far as I can tell, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fraternity_monument_Erdenet.jpg complies with the attribution requirements of the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License. That licence allows the creation of derivative works, which include the removal of any watermarks. The licence does not require maintaining a particular watermark or notice within an image. The file is therefore legally hosted on Wikipedia Commons and I see no reason for its deletion." Sandstein (talk) 08:02, 26 September 2009 (UTC)