[Clipart] Nazi flag

Nicu Buculei (OCAL) nicu at apsro.com
Wed Aug 3 23:39:39 PDT 2005


Kevin Wixson wrote:
> I think OCAL policy should be guided by law. If any drawing would be 
> prohibited by law, then it should not be permitted. In a generalized 
> distribution, the law of all countries to which the clipart is to be 
> targeted for distribution should be considered. If localized versions of 
> the clipart library are possible, or could be made from an all-inclusive 
> source which is then limited for a locale by filter, then just the laws 
> of the target country should be considered.

This is already happening. For example Debian include a package which 
remove some images, one of them being the Nazi flag. This is our policy: 
let the distributors include/censor whatever they want.

> Thus, the Nazi flag would be banned, unless a localized version for 
> France could be made, where distribution of any Nazi themed goods are 
> prohibited. Child pornography is more tricky in that it is a 
> discretionary decision about the "age" of drawn figures, but at least it 
> would be safe to disallow any obvious child pornography since it is more 
> or less universally prohibited.

It seems the porn topic is very hot in the last couple of weeks (see the 
list archive, also for a position of the developers [1]) but we have yet 
to receive *any* pornographic clipart (we deleted a few files because 
they were not clipart, not because were pornographic)

> Moreover, the librarians could work on a system ( which I do believe is 
> being considered if not already in development) where users could "vote" 
> on art as offensive, recorded in the art's meta-data, and users could 
> set their access to the library to a personal purity threshold to filter 
> out offensive content.

I am definitely against this, because it would allow a vocal minority to 
impose censorship. A few users voting are not representative for the 
entire audience.



[1] mostly the relevant threads are:
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/clipart/2005-July/003662.html
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/clipart/2005-August/003743.html

-- 
nicu
Open Clip Art Library: http://www.openclipart.org



More information about the clipart mailing list