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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Cacique (talk | contribs) at 05:53, 26 August 2007. The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Wikipedia:Possibly unfree images/Header

An archiving system was implemented July 2007. For older discussions, see the history pages. For all discussions from July 3, 2007 forward, see the Archive.

Holding cell

These images have been listed for at least 14 days. Images which have been determined to be acceptable may be removed from this page.

June 8

June 15

Personality Photos

  • Image:GABLE01.jpg, Image:NATCOLE01.jpg Image:ARMST01.jpg, Image:JDEAN1.jpg, Image:MMONROE1.jpg, Image:BOGART01.jpg, Image:TAYLORF2.jpg, Image:CAGNEY01.jpg, Image:JCAGNEY2.jpg, Image:Lucy10.jpg, Image:Lucy7.jpg, Image:FSINATRA1.jpg, Image:FSINATR2.jpg, Image:FSINATR4.jpg, Image:JLENN01.jpg, Image:PMCCTY1.jpg, Image:MRSIL01.jpg, Image:MRSIL02.jpg, Image:OZ-07.jpg, Image:BONZACAST.jpg, Image:Image-103B.jpg, Image:MMONROE2.jpg, Image:UNCLE.jpg, Image:CANGELS.jpg, Image:BARRYM.jpg, and Image:MCNVY.jpg— All these images were uploaded with the licensing given as under Creative Commons. Most seem to be publicity photos that would likely still be the property of the photographers and/or studios they were made for, there are a couple of baby pictures that may be in the public domain. While Fair Use may apply to some of these images, the uploader's assertion of ownership by licensing under the Creative Commons seems unlikely even though they come from a gallery website he runs. —Elipongo (Talk contribs) 03:51, 1 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]
    • The Howard Frank Archives has been in business for over thirty years as an image archive and supplier of images to major publications and other media outlets. We have aproximately 1 million images in our inventory. Mostly in the entretainment industry. The bulk of the collection was at one time the property of Louis "doc" Shurr, Mr. Howard Frank's cousin and a respected Hollywood agent whose clients included, Bob Hope, Kim Novak, Ginger Rogers, Burt Lahr, Betty Grable, Debbie Reynolds, George Murphy, Andy Devine, Broderick Crawford, Larry Hagman, Barbara Eden among many others.
    We have been major contributors of images to major books on Hollywood personalities. Including:
    Lucy : A Life in Pictures by Tim Frew and Howard Frank Archives/Personality Photos Staff
    Dreaming of Jeannie: TV's Prime Time in a Bottle by Stephen Cox and Howard Frank
    Ball of Fire, Lucille Ball By Stefan Kanfer
    Loving Lucy By Bart Andrews and Thomas Watson
    Lucy & Desi By Warren G. Harris
    The "I LOve Lucy" Book By Bart Andrews
    Elvis, A life in pictures By Tim Frew
    Lucille: The Life of Lucille Ball By Kathleen Brady
    The Century By Peter Jennings and Tom Brewster
    You can do a search on Google, Amazon.com or Barnes and Noble to confirm our claims.
    And many many other publications and magazines. Our clients include all major television networks such as CBS, ABC, NBC, E Entretainment, E!, PBS and others. Major publications such as TV Guide, People, US, Time Magazine, Newsweek, Globe, The enquirer, Reader's Digest, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Medical Journal, Scientific American, Ladies Home Journal and many others too numerous to mention here. We have never had our right to rent or use these images disputed. As with any large inventory such as ours, it is possible that we may inadvertently by accident have posted an image to which someone may claim intellectual property rights. In such cases we will be more than willing to comply in removing such an image provided the standard provisions are met as stated below by contacting our intellectual property rights department
    Anyone who believes that their intellectual property rights have been infringed, must provide our Intellectual Property Rights Agent with a notification that contains the following information:
    1. A physical signature of a person authorized to act on behalf of the owner of the copyright or other rights that have been allegedly infringed.
    2. Identification of the copyright, trademark or other rights that have been allegedly infringed.
    3. The URL or product number(s).
    4. Your name, address, telephone number and email address.
    5. A statement that you have a good-faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the rights owner, its agent or the law.
    6. A statement that the information in the notification is accurate and, under penalty of perjury, that you are authorized to act on behalf of the owner of the copyright or other right that is allegedly infringed.
    You may reach our Intellectual Property Rights Agent, via email at sales@personalityphotos.com --PersonalityPhotos 06:20, 1 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]
      • Thank you very much for your detailed reply and also thank you for helping us to improve Wikipedia. This case will likely need people better versed in these things than I, but as I understand it the issue is not that of disputing your renting or using the images, but rather that you've uploaded the images onto Wikipedia's servers and have released them under Creative Commons licenses. Since only the owner of the copyright can assign the license, you are asserting that you are yourself the copyright holder of these images- including a couple of images that seem could actually be in the public domain. Wikipedia has no interest in you removing images from your collection, but now that they are on Wikipedia's servers, Wikipedia has liability if a copyright holder should protest their being released under a free license. Wikipedia needs to be assured that you indeed hold the rights to these images. There is a method using the Wikipedia:OTRS by which you can forward your documentation to the foundation, but as I am not familiar with it, I will leave it to one of the others who regularly edit this page to help you with that. Thank you again for helping out and for your note. —Elipongo (Talk

contribs) 07:23, 1 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]



Reply to the above by Elipongo

      • Since only the owner of the copyright can assign the license, you are asserting that you are yourself the copyright holder of these images- including a couple of images that seem could actually be in the public domain.
        Our images come in several categories. We have the negatives to most of the images in our inventory. In other cases we have the "Master Negatives" or in the case of other images the in-camera chromes from which they are printed. In some cases we have the only known original prints of the images. Until 1990 most studios discarded rather than archived massive amounts of imgaes literaly in the garbage. Thus most images taken during that period are lost to history except in cases where collectors like howard Frank through family contacts and friends acquired many of them. Being that we have the onl;y images in many of these cases we do claim copyright ownership of them. We have selectively uploaded imgaes of which we are sure of the provenance.
      • Wikipedia has no interest in you removing images from your collection, but now that they are on Wikipedia's servers, Wikipedia has liability if a copyright holder should protest their being released under a free license.
        Wikipedia has no liabilty since they are neither the owners nor the source of the images, we are. We have a procedure as does Corbis or Getty for settling claims to Intelectual property claims as stipulated in my previous post.
      • Wikipedia needs to be assured that you indeed hold the rights to these images.
        That does not present a problem, we can issue a standard open ended release of our images to Wikipedia as we do to television broadcasters, publications and other entities that use our images. They can keep it on file and forward copies to whoever "claims" to be the copyright holder of the image. All we need is an e-mail address where to send a signed PDF document release. Be aware that claiming to be the copyright holder and actually posessing such rights are two distinct things. Corporate lawyers will often issue threatening letters claiming intelectual property rights. They mainly do this to discourage legitimate use of images in an editorial or fair use context and in order to attempt to control the editorial context in which these images appear.. That is why we require as do the courts extensive documentation to back up such claims. After thirty plus years in this business we have yet to appear in court to dispute any of our images.--PersonalityPhotos 04:17, 2 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]
No release of the images to Wikipedia is necessary. At this point, there's no reason to believe that you don't have the authority to release the image to the public under a CC-BY license, for which we thank you for your generosity. However, I just want to confirm that you are aware that this allows anybody anywhere in the world to use the photos now for any purpose, including commercial redistribution and derivative works. If this is unacceptable to you, please let us know and we will have the images deleted. howcheng {chat} 21:52, 2 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]


We are well aware of the stipulations. Most of our business is suplying high resolution versions of our images 400 dpi and above, a far higher quality that is rrequired by commercial users of our images, than what we are contributing to Wikipedia. There is a growing market in low res images for internet use, but we feel contributing a couple of hundred images to Wikipedia is not going to effect our bottom line. Bottom line, we aren't worried about it. As to the issue of commercial distribution, that falls into an entire other area outside of copyright law. The images may of course be used in an editorial context if attibution to source is made as per our condition. Commercial use is beyond our scope since images of well known personalitities for commercial products require in addtion to copyright permission a license which can only be issued by the heirs of the estates of such persons or their authorized representatives. In other words, we may own the images and rights to them, to use them commercially however, requires the permission of the estates of the people appearing in the images. That is beyond our ability or authority to do. As for derivative works, basically the same rules apply. They can use the images any way they see fit as long as they cite the source. At such low resolution as we are supplying, to be quite frank, their use is generally limited to the internet in editorial contexts such as this. One thing that does come to mind is, will we have to go through this every time we upload additional images? Or is there a way to avoid this in the future. There are a lot of articles in which we feel we could enahnce the article by contributing images to them. --PersonalityPhotos 01:52, 3 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

That requirement is in direct violation of the reuse requirement of the GFDL license. Corvus cornix 02:04, 3 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Please clarify as to what you are referring to. I was simply pointing out in the above that commercial use of our images in which appears a personality living or dead that has an estate that claims patent or trademark rights is beyond our authority to grant. Anyone can use the images any way they want in an editorial context. Images in which no recognizable persons appear are free to be used in any manner whatsoever. As an example, an image of Lucille Ball may be used editorially in any manner and we grant copyright rights to do so. I am simply pointing out however, that someone using an image of Lucille Ball in a commercial context besides having copyright authority which we grant in free use, must also obtain a license from the Lucille Ball estate to use a likeness of her commercially. That is patent and trademark law and has nothing to do with copyright. We cannot grant rights to commercial use which we do not have. By the same token, if the Lucille Ball estate wanted to use one of our images (other than what we uploaded to wikipedia) they would have to come to us to use the image insofar as copyright license were need (something they have done in the past incidentally). In other words, we can only grant copyright rights alone. Commercial issues are another matter that have nothing to do with copyright law. We cannot grant rights to commercial use of images in which the likeness of a person appears as that is not a right that any copyright holder of any image possesses. In a recent supreme court decision regarding the Marilyn Monroe estate, they were claiming rights to the use of images outside of a commercial context. They rightly lost that case, but if you still want to use the image of Marilyn Monroe to sell toothpaste or use her image on lunch-boxes, you still need to obtain a license from her estate. It is a patent and trademark issue, NOT a copyright issue.--PersonalityPhotos 03:46, 3 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

To reply to your earlier question, IMO the best way to avoid these types of issues in the future would be to create a page in http://www.personalityphotos.com/wikipedia/ (for example http://www.personalityphotos.com/wikipedia/license.html) stating that images in that directory are released under the CC-BY license; you could also include the appropriate information regarding the patent and trademark issues there. You could have your legal people write the appropriate release and such to avoid any doubt. Then link to this page as part of the image description page for each image you upload, and there should be no more problems.
As for the trademark issues, does {{trademark}} adequately state the situation? If so, simply include that template just after the {{cc-by-2.5}} template for the images to which the trademark issue applies; you could also include a hidden note such as <!-- The pictured personality or their estate maintains trademark rights over their image. --> with the template to help ensure that other Wikipedia editors don't mistakenly remove the trademark template. I'm interested in hearing more about the patent issues here, I never thought a picture could be patented (just trademarked and/or copyrighted). Anomie 12:31, 3 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Wikipedia is reproducible. Anybody can pick it up and use it for whatever purposes they want, commercial or not, so long as they abide by the GFDL requirements that they explain where they got the material from. This means that these images could be used for commercial purposes without compensation, and therefore your limitation against commercial use violates Wikipedia's reuse requirement. Corvus cornix 16:40, 3 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I think you're misunderstanding PersonalityPhotos's statement. Even with an appropriate copyright license, trademark law may affect how a particular image may be used. This normally comes up in the context of logos, as many logos are ineligible for copyright in the US (where Wikipedia is located) but are still trademarked. PersonalityPhotos is not even claiming they have the trademark rights in these images, BTW, so it isn't even their restriction. Also, note that while textual contributions to Wikipedia are all under the GFDL, there is no requirement that images be under that license. Anomie 18:28, 3 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I am quite satisfied with PersonalityPhotos' excellent explanation and I think that Anomie's proposal for the attribution of these images is a good one— that way PersonalityPhotos shouldn't have to go through this rigaramole again. —Elipongo (Talk contribs) 02:17, 4 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Just thought I'd add that these images would be of even more benefit to the entire project if they were uploaded to Wikimedia Commons instead of here. We'd just have to make sure they know what's up so we don't have to go through this whole discussion again. —Elipongo (Talk contribs) 14:47, 4 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]
An OTRS ticket would help. -N 15:18, 4 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you all for your suggestions, I will try to get things set up this weekend on our website in the wikipedia directory as per Anomies suggestion so people understand the limitations on using some of the images commercially. I will message some of you with some questions on particulars on how we can set some of these things up. Curious as to what an OTRS ticket is. I may also need some help with the formatting and possibly in designing some template.Patent was not a good word to use, I only brought it up because someone mentioned GFDL license which is more appropriate for items such as software, use of photos commercially fall more into patent and intellectual property law. --PersonalityPhotos 04:38, 6 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Information about Wikipedias Open-source Ticket Request System (OTRS): Wikipedia:OTRS -- Algotr 20:34, 10 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

(unindent)So... it's been fourteen days now and if I'm not mistaken the consensus is that they're all okay. Should I remove the tags from the image pages and the article captions myself or is someone else supposed to do that? Should a link to this discussion be included so that we don't repeat this? —Elipongo (Talk contribs) 04:25, 15 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Nevermind, I just saw the blurb at the top of the page. —Elipongo (Talk contribs) 04:27, 15 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Ok we are ready to include a page on our site in the wikipedia directory as per suggestions in the above discussion. I have no clue as to how to proceed next so a headsup would be welcome.--PersonalityPhotos 19:59, 15 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Has anyone replied to PersonalityPhotos' request for help here yet? —Elipongo (Talk contribs) 20:56, 16 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Do we have to say 'Frank Howard archives' in the image caption on the article page? Despite being already described on the image page. Gareth E Kegg 20:40, 17 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

This is to alert you that the matter was discussed on the Administrators noticeboard and we think the copyright status is unclear to problematic. Please review the discussion there. The best suggestion seems to be to run these by the Wikimedia Foundation general counsel. For one or two images it would not be worthwhile, but for a large group of valuable additions to Wikipedia, best to have a definitive decision. Wikidemo 21:00, 18 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Should the photos be tagged as copywritten, but with a special category stating it is a publicity/press photo and must be properly cited, presumably both in the upload and the article? Andyross 15:20, 12 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]



We have added the following to our wikipedia directory as per suggestions from a number of other users.

http://www.personalityphotos.com/wikipedia/license.html

we still need to resolve how this will be tagged to images in dispute and who would do that. Obvioulsy because of a conflict of interest we cannot do so ourselves.

I apologize in the delay of the reply, but we were involved in a number of other projects which consumed our time.

PersonalityPhotos 05:53, 26 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]


July 2

exclusive copyright of the photographic images that appear on the page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Gravel. I agree to publish that work under the creative commons Attribution '(by)' license..." -- it continues according to the correct form) and have forwarded it to permissions-en@wikimedia.org. Sylvar 15:30, 9 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

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