User talk:Mdd

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Are you going to Rev Del the original upload?

Here: File:Jos Beekman, redacteur Donald Duck, Amsterdam, okt. 1997 - 16.jpg

See: COM:REV DEL Thanks, -- Ooligan (talk) 21:23, 3 January 2024 (UTC)

Re: Loesje, On Kawara, and the limits of copyrightability

I just wanted to jump in to add my two cents as you develop what you called your "vision" on how Commons can or should interact with works claimed to be copyrighted. I'm sure you know much of this already, but the issues you're diving into are near and dear to me as well, and I fully understand how you've arrived at your conclusions/ideas, because that's where I arrived once too, so I wanted to offer my perspective.

I fully appreciate where it seems you're coming from, in the sense that I deeply respect artists, in particular conceptual artists, whose work I've learned a great deal from and love dearly: Félix González-Torres, Hans Haacke, Louise Lawler, and others have guided my intellectual and artistic growth. I have a great deal of respect for artists working in the realms of conceptual, minimalist, and other bleeding-edge forms of art.

But I think the issue here is that you are projecting formalist notions of authorship, creativity, and intent, into a realm where those things are discussed in a very different way. Legal analysis and the application of copyright law is just as much an art as visual arts, but it traffics in a different set of linguistic tools, which have extremely specific meanings. No matter how much I love a work of art, to analyze it in the context of U.S. copyright law requires unemotional, specific visual and physical analysis, with a defined set of attributes and elements that must be present for a work to receive copyright. This has nothing to do with the artistic merit or conceptual meaning of the works, as defined by critics, art historians, viewers, the artist, or even the Copyright Office. The Copyright Office don't truly weigh whether a work has merit. They have to follow a specific set of guidelines, laid out by U.S. law, to determine a work's copyrightability. As I'm sure you know, many conceptual and minimalist artists have in fact had individual works rejected by the office, even in the cases of acclaimed and generally meritorious works.

This doesn't mean all conceptual art is meaningless if it can't be copyrighted, nor does it mean artists who create this kind of art are not worthy of selling and profiting off their own work, which is I think what many artists feel is being implied when their work is argued to be ineligible for copyright. In fact, I would argue that some of the best conceptual artists have recognized the limitations of visual art linguistics and expression in the context of copyright law by creating art that interacts with other legal structures to form its "uniqueness" or "meaning;" I'm thinking here particularly of González-Torres, who created "certificates of authenticity" for many of his conceptual works, which are essentially legal contracts assigning ownership, structure, and, in a certain sense, "meaning" to his works, which in many cases would not otherwise be eligible for legal protection under copyright because of their inherent form. Indeed, this is a rich area of artistic exploration; one door being closed (copyright protection) does not mean others aren't open. (See also: this great College Art Association Award-winning paper exploring how artists and institutions can instead copyright depictions or documentation of land art and other site-specific works which are ineligible for copyright under U.S. law)

Yet, from my perspective, there is also a bigger, overarching issue here, which is the fundamental misalignment of interests by the parties involved in these specific types of copyright disputes.

• Artists and artist's estates, on the most part want the protections that come with copyright, obviously, and they are certainly within their rights to claim that what they produce is eligible for copyright. But they have no incentive to go further and prove it, because if they were to be rejected, as is likely for many conceptual and minimalist artists' work, that rejection could be demonstrable proof that other copyright claims they make about similar artworks are invalid. So you don't exactly see many conceptual artists clamoring to the U.S. Copyright Office to get their works rejected, as they surely know is likely.
• Cultural institutions, by virtue of needing to work with living artists and artists' estates in order to exhibit their work, have an interest in deferring to an artist's own beliefs on the copyrightability of their art; it's always going to be easier for a museum to just say "yes, that's copyrighted" to avoid an argument with an artist who wants photos of their art to run with copyright notices. And if museums/cultural institutions were to truly adopt the letter of the law as their policies on copyright, many artists would stop working with them, because the artists would probably view it as the institutions "bowing down" to legal principles that the artists may view as unfair, incorrect, or overreaching because they rob the artist of the financial/legal benefits of copyright ownership. So museums have literally no incentive to do full analyses of the copyright claims of artists they exhibit.
• And Commons/Commons users have the exact opposite incentives. The goal of the project, badly paraphrased, is to provide access to free images and culture. Under the letter of the law, that would include many works of art which are not legally copyrightable. Commons users, admin, and Wikimedia leadership want to build relationships with cultural institutions to help expand that access, but follow a fundamentally different rubric (the legal definitions) for identifying copyrighted works. Commons has an incentive to follow the letter of the law in order to a) not be sued and b) allow the widest possible amount of free images and access to free culture.

The misalignment of incentives here is key when it comes to fine art as being discussed here, because the different parties have vastly different resources and power. On Kawara's estate, as I'm sure you're aware, probably has a lot of money from sales of paintings from the estate, and theoretically also could make a lot of money by licensing images of the paintings if they were indeed copyrighted. So you have three groups, and they all want something different: artists, the most vocal of which are usually the ones with the most resources; museums, which want to offer access to culture but also have to play nice with artists to continue getting them/their estates on board for exhibitions; and Commons, which knows the law but is also not exactly looking for multi-million dollar lawsuits filed by artists and their galleries with the Artist's Rights Society backing them up.

I don't think there's really a good solution to any of this. But I would gently suggest that when discussing these issues, try and take the emotion out of the arguments: legal principles have firm meanings (until they don't, but that's why we have courts and case law). When others are trying to discuss these admittedly complex and nuanced principles, they're not impugning this kind of art, they're trying to analyze an issue through the lens of the law. Hope this is helpful in some roundabout way (and apologies if I'm just re-explaining things you already know). Have a good rest of your day! 19h00s (talk) 20:58, 20 February 2024 (UTC)

Thx for sharing these interesting perspectives. Unfortunately I am busy this week and maybe further, and might share some details and do some further inquiries next week. Best regards. -- Mdd (talk) 23:16, 20 February 2024 (UTC)

Thx @19h00s: again for your contribution and patience. As you acknowledged in your opening I do develop new vision, which actually starts with a societal perspective and can picture what you called "fundamental (mis)alignment of interests by the parties." Two examples, first my lastest upload which in the basic schows that I have been working developing that vision for over 25 years in different standpoints in society. You mentioned the artist, cultural institutions and Wikimedia users, which could have been pictured in the same way. Second after a previous copyright dispute I made an analyses over that fundamental misaligment, see here. Now I am well aware that this makes sense to me, but will be mumbo-jumbo for practically everybody else.

This is a sneak preview of what I am talking about. I believe in time, a year or more, this could be helpful to picture these fundamental difficulties for the one reason you gave:

But I think the issue here is that you are projecting formalist notions of authorship, creativity, and intent, into a realm where those things are discussed in a very different way...

There is indeed the realm of the legal system and simulation of that real here on Commons to get our stuff legally in order. Yet, and that is what I have experience on Wikiquote-EN for years: there are procedures at place and standards set, that if you keep it up you don't have to enter that realm of the legal system.

Now I don't know how far you have traced back the origin of the COM:VPC discussion. The discussion about the copyright on the work of On Kawara is highly theoretical and there is nothing at stack. It emerged from the copyright discussion about the status of the Loesje posters, which is similar. Now this is the case at hand:

• Three years ago a series of 300+ Valentine wish posters in Rotterdam were developed and presented in Rotterdam by a unique cooperation of over 500+ people and a staff of 10+ small companies.
• These posters were photographed and uploaded to Wikimedia Commons without proper documentation of even analysis of what was at stack.
• Three years later I questioned these works on Commons and all hell broke loose

We have a precautionary principle that the uploader should first be aware of the copyright status of that work. He uploaded two Loesje posters as well, where there was explicitly mentioned that these works were under copyright. Here is what I call a community consensus, a thin one maybe but still. What I would like to see here, that we focus on those two aspects first. Judge the situation on our procedures and standards first. Now at the moment I am still busy and will have little time this week and beyond, and will leave it with these two cents in return. Best regard. -- Mdd (talk) 23:32, 25 February 2024 (UTC)

Warning

Hi, I think this is not OK. Do not hunt other people's contributions, and do not attack people. Thanks, Yann (talk) 14:38, 2 March 2024 (UTC)

Sorry you lost me. I have brought this subject under attention a month ago here. -- Mdd (talk) 15:57, 2 March 2024 (UTC)

@Yann: , your link gives me no result. If you refer to this edit I agree. Even more and earlier part I wrote "Want dat vind ik ook bezwaarlijk hier, daar lijkt geen natuurlijke persoon achter te zitten..." makes no sense, because there is a natural person behind it. And that is disrespectful as well, and not intended in that what. Therefor also my apologies. If this is what you mean, I will remove that whole sentence. Thx, --- Mdd (talk) 21:00, 2 March 2024 (UTC)

No I mean the whole section. Yann (talk) 21:09, 2 March 2024 (UTC)

Ok, well I can tell you @Yann: that the origin of this comment started Feb 4, 2024, when I started migrating the 163 subcategorieën in Category:Posters of the Netherlands by year from Category:Posters of the Netherlands, 1751 to Category:1751 posters of the Netherlands, see for example here; after a week earlier the whole Category:Posters of Belgium by year was altered in similar way by others. Now I migrated the whole 155 categories and then hit a irregular series of 750+ posters, which I kept apart see here, and didn't migrate like the rest. In these series there was one set of Category:Valentine's Day 2021 in Rotterdam, which seem to have copyright issues, which I therefor nominated.

In this particular case the copyright concerns are one thing, the character of the work and the unprecedented quantities are another thing. This is why I started that De Kroeg talk item. Now what I would like to do is let the De Kroeg discussion take its course. I think the outcomes about this discussion could take a lot of time. Therefor I would like to withdraw the Deletion requests for the Category:Valentine's Day 2021 in Rotterdam posters, and reconsider in half a year or so. -- Mdd (talk) 21:44, 2 March 2024 (UTC)