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Huge German Donation Marks Wikipedia's Evolution
Raul654 writes "In December, we discussed the German Federal Archive's agreement, at the urging of Wikimedia Deutschland, to donate 100,000 pictures to Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. At the time that was the largest picture donation ever to Wikipedia, and thought to be largest in the history of the free culture movement. Now Wikimedia Deutschland has reached a similar agreement with the Saxon State and University Library, which will donate 250,000 pictures to Wikipedia under CCA-ShareAlike. On a not-unrelated note: Microsoft has announced that it will discontinue its Encarta encyclopedia."
"Submitting a picture is a simple thing. It shouldn't involve much learning." - in a world without copyright that's true. It's technically trivial create something like 4chan.
But if you want such a database to be reusable and legally trusthworthy, and not a legal land mine, then you have to ask a bit more of your contributors. And copyright law, especially international copyright law, is anything but simple.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton