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Wikimedia chapters and communities challenge Commons' URAA policy

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By The ed17

Following a trend started by Wikimedia Israel, Wikimedia Argentina has published an open letter challenging the recent deletion of hundreds of images from the Commons under its policy on URAA-restored copyrights, relating to the United States' 1994 Uruguay Round Agreements Act. In part, it reads:



Volunteers from Argentina have been among the most affected by the policy adopted by Wikimedia Commons administrators regarding images that could fall under URAA copyright provisions. Argentine copyright law provides that images enter the public domain “only” 25 years after their production and 20 after their first documented publication. This relatively generous criterion has enabled unaffiliated volunteers and we as Wikimedia Argentina to enrich Commons with hundreds of thousands of historical images that are absolutely free under Argentine law: images of the political and every day life of the country, of its culture, of its popular idols, of its joyful and dark days, of its customs and architecture.

However, over the last months certain Wikimedia Commons administrators have conducted massive deletions of these contents, in many cases involving entire categories. The burden of proof has been inverted: instead of having to justify the deletion of a certain file, things go that volunteers have to devote their time trying to justify the validity of their efforts. This has caused great damage, not only by way of our readers losing access to free educational contents, but also de-motivating many editors and volunteers by making them feel that their efforts are ultimately vain and that our goal of free knowledge for everyone is being replaced by a certain legal fetishism whose reason gets lost in processes and misses the outcome.


In an effort to comply with the Berne Convention, the URAA regranted copyright protection to some works that had been previously free to use. Unsurprisingly, it quickly faced vociferous legal challenges; the largest, Golan v. Holder, failed on the steps of the US Supreme Court in 2012. The conflict on Commons stems from the location of the Wikimedia Foundation's servers, which are used to host all of Commons' images and are in the US, making them subject to US laws. Compounding this are the several Wikipedias—including four of the top nine by article count—which outsource their local image hosting to Commons.

Argentina (flag pictured) has very liberal copyright laws—photographs enter the public domain just 25 years after creation and 20 years after first being published—and has therefore been been hit harder than other countries by the URAA deletions.

The issuing of the open letters prompted a response from the Foundation's Board of Trustees. Under "on content", the board's chair Jan-Bart de Vreede stated that "The WMF does not plan to remove any content unless it has actual knowledge of infringement or receives a valid DMCA takedown notice. To date, no such notice has been received under the URAA. We are not recommending that community members undertake mass deletion of existing content on URAA grounds, without such actual knowledge of infringement or takedown notices." An impromptu vote to restore all images deleted to comply with the URAA is currently underway, with a majority in support as of publishing time.

One oppose vote came from Lupo, who wrote that "The WMF has told us several times that all files hosted must be free in the U.S. And now we should ignore the URAA? A U.S. law, upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court? Just because the WMF doesn't like it?" Odder, who also opposes the proposal, called back to Commons' core principles: "... files have to be released under a free licence or be in the public domain both in the country of origin and in the United States. Undeletion of files that are unfree in the US will be in direct contradiction to this core principle of ours." In supporting, ליאור wrote that "6.7 billion non-American people should not be affected by an extremist interpretation of an intra-American affair." Supporters have also suggested adding a URAA-specific disclaimer to affected images that would warn US content reusers that they could face legal action.

Discussion is continuing on Commons, and Wikimedia Israel's Spain's, and Venezuela's open letters are available on Meta.

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26 February 2014 (all comments)
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    These comments are automatically transcluded from this article's talk page. To follow comments, add the page to your watchlist. If your comment has not appeared here, you can try purging the cache.

    The phrase "According to the WMF's Product Manager Fabrice Florin..." reads to me like you're implying the Wikimedia Foundation only has a single product manager. There is, in fact, an entire team of product managers, with each product manager having a focus on a different area. I'd instead suggest the wording "According to Fabrice Florin, the Product Manager for Multimedia at the WMF, ...". --Dan Garry, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 03:42, 28 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

    Thank you Dan, I've made the change. Ed [talk] [majestic titan] 03:46, 28 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]
    Thanks! --Dan Garry, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 03:54, 28 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

    Let me just say this: DOWN WITH COPYRIGHT PARANOIA!. Thank you for your attention :) --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 05:12, 28 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

    Discussion is also active on wikimedia-l - David Gerard (talk) 08:21, 28 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

    Ed, thank you very much for covering the URAA/Commons debate! As the primary author of Wikimedia Israel's letter, it was important for me to underscore that we're not fighting to save this or that particular image (except iconic imagery), but for the future of the way we handle images across all projects, as well as the future of all non-US Wikimedia chapters. This is why the issue is so important and many feel that it has been hijacked by a small number of people who are very active on Commons without enough input from the community as a whole. Hopefully this Signpost exposure will let more Wikipedians know of the issue at hand.

    It is important to understand that for countries like Israel (and dozens of others) with shorter copyright terms, not allowing to upload these images could mean the inability to use any older images on Wikipedia ever, because the authors for most of these images cannot be verified in any reasonable amount of time. That is, it is impossible to know when the author died, and therefore the image theoretically cannot be used even 50 years from now. Having a generic law allowed us to use these images, and while there might only be a few thousands of them for Israel at the moment, if we're successful even in our current GLAM collaborations, we're looking at tens of thousands of others. I'm sure that if you combined all of the relevant countries, you'll get millions of potential images, wiped out in a rash decision.

    As long as there's no legal urgency to delete the files (and according to the WMF, there isn't), I encourage everyone to leave them alone and do everything in their power so that more such free images can be uploaded in the future. —Ynhockey (Talk) 22:02, 28 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

    Yes, this is an important issue. The Golan v. Holder decision two years ago prompted a discussion over 30,000 words long, and the WMF's Board and Legal team have issued a number of statements about the issues and options we face (e.g. on the possibility of setting up Commons servers outside the US). Commons volunteers have been working since then to address the situation following the WMF's guidance, and have identified and deleted thousands of files (not hundreds) protected by copyright under the URAA. Many of these have been identified individually, while others have been grouped together with other images with a similar status (e.g. all the pages from a certain book, or all German postage stamps from a certain year). But there have been no mass deletions of the sort rejected two years ago, when it was decided that the circumstances of each image needed to be considered.
    Open letters are great for bringing an issue to broader attention, but that in itself doesn't get us anywhere. Complex issues need the right sort of attention, and there seems to be more heat than light in the current debate, more confusion than clarity. When one of the letters (the one quoted in this Signpost article, from WM Argentina) is full of misconceptions about the issues, that only takes us backwards. I hope there will be no rash actions, like the proposed mass restoration on Commons of thousands of files that have been identified as copyright violations.
    There are some options available to other projects that Commons cannot take, such as uploading non-free files under exemptions laid out in an EDP. Commons' policies regarding files that are free in some jurisdictions but not others could also be reconsidered. I encourage thoughtful discussion of such options. --Avenue (talk) 05:13, 2 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]
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