Last modified: 2014-11-19 22:45:55 UTC
As a general matter, under US law (and the extensive precedents set by Google), text snippets and image thumbnails of the sort that could be used in a twitter card are likely to be fair use. That said, we should still try to display as much licensing information as we practically can, and consider what to do in cases where we can't. (e.g., if we can't parse the license information of an image, should we rely on fair use or should we just not show the image?) Opening this bug to track those sorts of questions. Is there any way (beta labs or some such) to see what the extension currently does about licensing?
From Jared in a different bug, recording here FTR. ------------ @luis, I can think of 2 options, I don't know how possible either are… 1. modify the image, add a footer which contains the basic licensing req. as a watermark 2. modify the request for the description text only when pulled from twitter and include the licensing info in the description sent to twitter. ------------ Let's discuss in real life, but: 1. I'd love, love for us to build a "add a tasteful license watermark" tool into our stack (for a whole variety of purposes other than this one); no idea if that makes sense as a showstopper here, though. As an example, @opensourceway on twitter does this with a variety of their images- e.g. https://twitter.com/opensourceway/status/501817634510209024 But I think they do this for *all* their images, not just the ones they pipe to twitter. For both #1 and #2, the content is fed to twitter from meta tags, so they're happy to take separate/auto-generated content for every content. Of course, it's another several hundred bytes a page, etc., etc. On #2, there is only 200 characters to work with, so hard to see what a good attribution might look like in that context. (Simply CC BY-SA?)
I don't really see 1 working. A big thing on Commons is to provide high-quality clean images, and it's a significant project there removing watermarks from images where legally viable. Adding watermarks is highly discouraged, so having something to automatically add watermarks when sharing images doesn't seem like something very many people would be very happy about, even if it does make the images easier to share, because then what's being shared will be degraded and will reflect poorly back on the project. We want things to be the best possible quality when shared for the same reason we want them to be the best possible quality in general. If what's shared isn't that, and especially doesn't take people back to that, what's the point even having high quality images? Can't a link be sufficient for attribution and stuff on twitter same as it is on articles?
(In reply to Luis Villa (WMF Legal) from comment #0) > As a general matter, under US law (and the extensive precedents set by > Google), text snippets and image thumbnails of the sort that could be used > in a twitter card are likely to be fair use. > > That said, we should still try to display as much licensing information as > we practically can, and consider what to do in cases where we can't. (e.g., > if we can't parse the license information of an image, should we rely on > fair use or should we just not show the image?) > > Opening this bug to track those sorts of questions. Is there any way (beta > labs or some such) to see what the extension currently does about licensing? I've installed the extension on <http://test.uncyclopedia.co/>, feel free to test it there. <http://test.uncyclopedia.co/wiki/MediaWiki> is an example page. <https://dev.twitter.com/docs/cards/validation/validator> shows you what the twitter card will look like, but it only works in WebKit browsers (Chromium, Opera, Safari). I'll upload an attachment of an example card. For attribution, Twitter doesn't really give you that many options. <https://dev.twitter.com/docs/cards/getting-started#content> lets you only link to their twitter username, which is pretty useless for us.
Created attachment 16289 [details] Example of current twittercard Screenshot of TwitterCard of <http://test.uncyclopedia.co/wiki/MediaWiki>.
Issara you are totally right, I wasn't proposing that the watermark cover the image area, rather than we append a black or white stripe to the bottom of the image with the license info, less than ideal, but not disturbing the image.
