Wikimedia commons

[Paul Wormer]

The following question has doubtlessly been asked and answered on this forum before, but  either I didn't understand the answer or I forget it: can I use pictures from Wikimedia Commons? In particular from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Hendrik_Antoon_Lorentz ?

[Milton Beychok]

Paul, when Stephen Ewen was active, he told me that we could only use (diagrams, charts, etc.) if we could find the real name of whoever had originally drawn them.

The photos of Lorentz in Commons are mostly labeled as being in the Public Domain, in which case I am not sure that the real name is necessary. If you could contact Stephen, he would probably know.

Milt Beychok

[Joe Quick]

If we can verify that they actually are public domain, then we don't need to track down the creator.  But a lot of things at wikipedia are labeled as something other than what they are.  This one, for example, is almost certainly not actually public domain (we're using it with permission from the photographer).  So in practice, one often has to track down the original creator anyway...

[Paul Wormer]

Yes Milton, Stephen told me that too. I can (sort of) understand this non-anonymity rule for recent draftsman work, but for these old photographs the rule seems to me too strict. The photographers holding the copyright  died long ago and one finds the same photographs everywhere,  in books and on the internet. Unless everybody on this forum will tell me not to do it, I will go ahead and add to my CZ articles some photos of Lorentz (died 1928)  and also of Maxwell (died 1879).

PS:  I rediscovered this page: http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Media_Assets_Workgroup/Help_requests
and saw that I asked  almost the same question on this page  four months ago, but never got an answer. Now I understand why I'm confused about this bl...y copyright business. Can't we simply ignore copyright and wait until lawyers start threatening us?  When they do, we can always remove the stuff they object to.

[Joe Quick]

That's probably fine.  Photos from the last few years of Lorentz's life might be copyrighted, but anything published before 1923 is considered public domain in the United States, where the Citizendium servers live.