User talk:Ruling party

Welcome to Wikimedia Commons, Ruling party!

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-- Wikimedia Commons Welcome (talk) 23:25, 24 November 2019 (UTC)

North Korean photos

Hi, Ruling party, this time on Commons!

I would be careful about uploading North Korean photographs. My position is that we don't know if photographs fall under "news reports" or "documents", etc. This varies from country to country and legal literature should be consulted to determine what the law means. Obviously, there is no legal literature about North Korea on this particular question, at least I haven't found any (there is some literature on the North Korean copyright law, but I haven't run into the definition of "news reports" and "documents"). At any rate, KCNA photos have and will be deleted.

Secondly, something like "Official photographs by the Government of the North Korea to showcase government ministers and new Central Committee members" is not a source. Where did you find these photos: a book, a newspaper, a website? That's the source.

Some of these photographs are old, and they might be in the public domain. The problem with North Korea (Template:PD-North Korea) however is that while the copyright term is unambiguous and rather lenient (50 years from death, or 50 years from publication if it is a "work of an institution, enterprise or organization"), it is often hard to tell who was the actual author. North Koreans usually don't credit photographers, at least in exported books etc. They could, perhaps, credit them in the original publications, which we don't have access to but should have access to in order to check. When they do credit authors, well good luck finding out when they died. And whatever a "work of an institution, enterprise or organization" means, I can't tell for certain since it takes an actual person to shoot a photograph, anonymously or not.

For pictures of dead individuals, in articles about them, I'd simply go with en:Wikipedia:Non-free content. The policy is full of legalese, but en:Wikipedia:File Upload Wizard will guide you through it with ease. – Finnusertop (talk ⋅ contribs) 00:23, 3 February 2021 (UTC)

@Finnusertop: The governmental photos were taken from a 1946 North Korean publication confiscated by the US Army and now kept at the National Archives. --Ruling party (talk) 14:31, 3 February 2021 (UTC)

Everything you said might very well be correct, but why can't we upload official governmental photos from 1946, but do it for those in 2021 (File:Kim Tok-hun.jpg)? I'm not against deleting them, but then we should initiate a discussion somewhere about this. --Ruling party (talk) 14:31, 3 February 2021 (UTC)

1946 is in the public domain if it's a "work of an institution, enterprise or organization" (but see above; I'm not exactly sure what that means).

These recent uploads (like File:Kim Tok-hun.jpg) should be deleted, yes. I've had a bunch of them deleted already, namely those with a KCNA watermark, because it's easy to refer to previous deletion discussions. With these Uriminzokkiri photos (which probably are just KCNA photos without a watermark anyway), a new deletion discussion should be started to address exactly what I was talking about above: are photos "news reports", "documents". I've put that on hold until at least one related discussion (Commons:Deletion requests/File:Destruction of Inter-Korean Liaison Office (4).jpg) where this has been discussed gets closed. The deletion discussion process is severely backlogged, so I stick with obvious speedy deletion cases where I can simply refer to a precedent. Right now the productive thing to do is not to upload anything we're not sure of, I think. – Finnusertop (talk ⋅ contribs) 19:19, 3 February 2021 (UTC)