Category talk:Hagia Sophia (Istanbul) - Komnenos mosaics

Public Domain

As one cannot copyright a photo of a 2-D piece of artwork beyond the life of the copyright of the 2-D artwork, I would think all images in this category, being of the same mosaic that is well beyond the copyright limits of any nation, would be public domain. Several are listed as various types of creative commons. I wanted to check before changing their statuses. MPSchneiderLC (talk) 15:28, 17 September 2022 (UTC)

Please do not automatically change the statuses of files that have a validly granted license. Among the hundreds of different legal jurisdictons in the world, some might grant coyright to such photographs. As much as possible, Commons wants the files to be reusable worldwide, including in jurisdictions where they might be copyrighted and thus where they are reusable with a free license, whereas they would not be reusable there without a license. In jurisdictions where the photographs might not be copyrighted, reusers can just ignore the license, although, even there, it is still good practice to mention the license and other information, so that the information is preserved and the files can be further reused legally anywhere. Also, Commons wants the licensing information to be true and accurate. Commons cannot counterfeit the information and change a valid license granted by the copyright owner. It is one thing to allow the uploading on Commons of files that may not be free outside of the United States (e.g. taken from a non-free source), as long as relevant warning tags are used and correct information is preserved. It would be a different thing to remove correct information and replace it with an incorrect claim that a photograph is public domain worldwide when in fact it is not. Some files in the category were copied from flickr, with a valid CC by 2.0 free license. They should be left as such, for reasons mentioned above. A different situation are photographs uploaded directly by the photographer to Commons with a free license. It was the object of discussions. The conclusion is that, for reasons of consistency with the views of of Wikimedia about photos of 2D PD art, Commons does not allow contributors to upload their own photographs of such art with a free license (i.e. with a claim of copyright on the photograph). If that happens, the solution is to ask the contributor to voluntarily change the licensing to a PD declaration. However, that is uneasy to enforce if the contributor refuses. That policy may be nice in theory by saying that Commons contributors should adhere to Wikimedia views on the subject, but in practice it's not a pleasant idea to delete free-licensed photographs just because they were taken by Commons contributors, while hosting similarly licensed photographs copied from elsewhere. -- Asclepias (talk) 18:40, 19 September 2022 (UTC)