In a number of stories about the government recently reduced Techdirt in the public domain - and not just by extending the copyright for future work, but also in the works currently in the field of public feedback under copyright, both the U.S. and the EU. Reverse this trend - after pushing the author close to the original 14, for example - will be difficult, to say the least.

But there is another way to fight against this loss, as the project of the Wikimedia Foundation shows:

Wiki

Monuments love was a crazy idea: ask people to leave their homes and take a picture of the surrounding cultural heritage, monuments and buildings! In September 2010, however, the idea was much of madness - 250 people participated in the Netherlands and submitted 12,500 photos. Last month, during the 2011 pan-European competition, which has crushed that number.



In recent months, volunteers from across Europe have worked hard to organize this photo contest of the public in 18 countries across Europe - from Portugal to the Estonia - and with great success. Over 5,000 people attended, with an incredible 165,000 photos, all available under a free license and can be used in Wikimedia Commons, Wikipedia and other sites on the Internet.



The key is the "free license" requires: Judging from this page the rules (in German), which seems to mean cc-by-sa. Strictly speaking, it is public, but the pictures released under this license are still widely used (including commercial).


Wiki loves Monuments The competition was a smart way to get people to contribute to this corner of the House of Commons digital, but many people are happy to do so, even without incentives. Flickr just announced that over 200 million photos on your site are published under a Creative Commons license. Now it is true that 145 million of these only allow non-commercial use, but that still leaves 18 million cc-by-sa, and 25 million licensed under the cc-by more liberal. , identi.ca, and Google