Bundesarchiv

December 7, 2008 1:17 PM

Starting on Thursday Dec 4, 2008, Wikimedia Commons will witness a massive upload of new images. We are anticipating about 100,000 files from a donation from the German Federal Archive. These images are mostly related to the history of Germany (including the German Democratic Republic) and are part of a cooperation between Wikimedia Germany and the Federal Archive...
posted by jim in austin (16 comments total)

Guess that will make up for them hunting down and deleting all the images I was nice enough to upload for them because of some licensing technicality.
posted by pravit at 1:22 PM on December 7, 2008 [2 favorites]

Also in other news, Wikimedia is putting up a lot of money to develop more multi-media content, including user-edited video, similar to how user-edited pages work. It will mean a big expansion in computer and bandwidth resources. There were a bunch of news blurbs about it a few months ago but I can't find it at the moment. They are also developing a WYSIWYG interface to mediawiki to help encourage more editors.

In these times of recession and scaling back Wikipedia appears to be thriving, it's budget expands by a big amount every year, and with the recent HQ move from FL to SF, it should see a lot more talent flowing in as people look for work, perhaps even resume building volunteer work, during the economic downturn. Sort of like how libraries, movies and other free/cheap entertainment do well when the economy is off.
posted by stbalbach at 1:33 PM on December 7, 2008

I was born from a wikipedian portal, naked, docile, common.
posted by ageispolis at 1:38 PM on December 7, 2008

Opening a pool now on how many images go up before yet another German court orders Wikipedia banned in the country. Place your bets, folks.
posted by ubernostrum at 1:43 PM on December 7, 2008

Poland, Jew ordered to perform hard labor:

For the first time they can make themselves useful. These Polish Kaftan-Jews*, whose activity so far has only consisted of working against the volk-conscious German nation in the most detestable and conniving manner, receive the opportunity on the eastern front to make themselves really useful for the first time in their lives. Here they can be seen ready to embark on their work orders.

*Kaften-Jews: apparently a kaftan was a considered stereotypical Eastern Europen Jewish costume, thus "Kaftan-Jew" is a slur along the lines of calling an Arab a "towelhead". Comment stolen from slashdot commenter, explanation from reddit commenter.
posted by orthogonality at 2:30 PM on December 7, 2008

In the US, all works produced for the federal government are in the public domain. Is the German federal government permitted to hold copyright?

The US government would have no business slapping a license (even a liberal CC one) on public works. Does the Bundesarchiv normally place restrictions on what you can do with images you get from them?
posted by blasdelf at 3:16 PM on December 7, 2008

develop more multi-media content, including user-edited video, similar to how user-edited pages

This could be interesting, as well as bad.
posted by From Bklyn at 3:17 PM on December 7, 2008

In the US, all works produced for the federal government are in the public domain. Is the German federal government permitted to hold copyright

I believe the US government is unusual in this respect. Most other governments retain the copyright to their documents and publications. In the UK and other commonwealth countries, government publications are owned by the Crown, including the laws of the land.

(although currently copyright of the laws is waived)

The US government would have no business slapping a license (even a liberal CC one) on public works.

Sounds like socialism to me.
posted by cillit bang at 3:31 PM on December 7, 2008

(and I seriously screwed up the tags on that one)
posted by cillit bang at 3:32 PM on December 7, 2008

cillit bang: I wonder if the DDR had a 'socialist' approach to state copyright
posted by blasdelf at 4:48 PM on December 7, 2008

Sounds like socialism to me.

Which private parties were the U.S. government's works appropriated from?
posted by yath at 4:59 PM on December 7, 2008

The people, via tax revenues. But if you give the works back to the people for free, that's socialism. You hang on to them, and charge the people to look, that's capitalism.
posted by cillit bang at 6:29 PM on December 7, 2008 [1 favorite]

You hang on to them, and charge the people to look, that's capitalism.

I'm confused. Are we or are we not talking about monkey porn?
posted by mannequito at 6:46 PM on December 7, 2008

The Queen's monkey porn, no less.
posted by cillit bang at 7:12 PM on December 7, 2008

In the US, all works produced for the federal government are in the public domain. Is the German federal government permitted to hold copyright?

As noted, the US is nearly unique. There are a few limited exceptions, but for the most part, works of the government worldwide are protected by copyright. This seems to be consistent regardless of political system or ideology.

This is partly why almost every Wikipedia article on a world leader with a photograph is a crop of them visiting the White House.
posted by dhartung at 10:10 PM on December 7, 2008

When I saw this in the news yesterday, I thought, "The Nazi pictures are going to get the most page views."
posted by moonbiter at 12:00 AM on December 8, 2008