Introducing CommonsDB

What could you do if you had access to a registry with all the public domain and openly licensed images in the world? Get your imagination flowing, because an ambitious project has been started and is already in the pilot phase.

Introduction

Wikimedia Sweden is currently participating in the CommonsDB project. The project aims to build a media registry to allow for easy checking if an image is in the public domain, openly licensed, or neither. While good for the digital commons in general, it also offers great potential for the Wikimedia Commons community.

Background

The project has its origin in the update of the EU Copyright Directive and the Article 17, commonly known as the upload filter article. The German implementation had some details that sparked an idea. If an image was blocked but after an appeal was found to be in the public domain the platform is restricted to never block that image again. In practice, that requires them to have a registry for all images they know to be in the public domain. So far the law. But why stop there? We already know about many public domain and openly licensed images, we can seed a register with those and save people from being blocked in the first place. Thus, the idea of CommonsDB was born.

Potential

Now what could such a registry do for the Wikimedia community? It turns out that it has a huge potential. The benefits are most likely mainly for the Wikimedia Commons community and include, for example, the possibility to:

• Verify which copyright applies to content from other parties.
  • If a check is made during upload the user may not have to choose a license manually.
  • Find errors in already uploaded images; for example, versions of images that have been uploaded under a Creative Commons license even though the image is without copyright.
• Find duplicate files – files that have been uploaded multiple times without intention (and were not discovered through minimal variations in the image).
• Find images that are very similar to each other which are not duplicates but should be in the same category (for example, restorations).

What can you do?

At this stage the most important thing you can help us with is giving us input on how you imagine using this registry and its potential.

• Are the ideas we have useful to you?
• Does a registry like this give you other ideas?
• At which points in your workflow would you like to be supported?

Please give us all of your feedback as early as possible so that we can prioritize better how to proceed.

Learn more

CommonsDB page on Meta