[Clipart] OpenClipart and Debian.

[Jon Phillips]

Daniel Carrera wrote:
> Ted Gould wrote:
> 
> 
>>Could you please provide a reference for this law?  I find it hard to
>>believe that an archive of images including historical ones would be
>>illegal.  I searched, and I could not find anything.
> 
> 
> The Nazi flag *is* illegal in Germany. I've been told so by several 
> Germans. I'll ask Rene next time I see him.
> 

Yes, I've confirmed this by looking on the web. It seems though the law says 
illegal for "public" display...anyway...

> 
>>By the way, I'm scared of bunnies.  No pictures of bunnies.  Censorship
>>is still censorship no matter what political/economic/emotional reason
>>you attach to it.
> 
> 
> This position is silly. It is easy to say "censorship is still censorship" 
> but that view is overly simplistic, and reality is not that simple.

Yes, this is a simplistic view, but still an example of where do we draw the 
line and also WHO deems us eligible to do such a task.

> If you start handing out flyers on the street advocating torture, anti 
> seminism (or any kind of racism) or if you start handing out child 
> pornography, or if you start advocating suicide, or if start following 
> someone up the street yelling at them, you *are* going to get in trouble. 
> Isn't that censorship?

Yes, I see your point. It is about the public good. This is a hard line to follow.

> Flag burning is illegal in the states. Isn't that censorship?

Nobody really gets in trouble for it though...

> On the other hand, you can't censor everything.
> 
> There are real issues that have to be addressed, and shouldn't be ignored. 
> You have to draw a line *somewhere* between what kind of "censhorship" is 
> acceptable and what kind isn't. And going to either extreme (censor 
> everything, or censor nothing) is damaging, and is ignoring a real issue.
> 

I think the idea of providing ways to filter is the best...make our filtering 
tools better.

> 
>>I would have no problem making a category that is "Nazi Germany" and
>>allowing people to filter based on that category for their own uses, but
>>making different sets of the OCAL library based on particular people's
>>prejudices doesn't make a lot of sense.  There are too many of them to
>>cover all the cases.
> 
> 
> Ok, here you are making sense.
> 
> Yes, again, you have to draw a line somewhere and find some kind of 
> balance. You have to make a reasonable effort to respect people's 
> sensitivities, but you can't do everything.
> 
> So we need to decide on something that is "reasonable", based on how much 
> work it is to do, and how much benefit it brings. Find a balance.
> 
> This is what I propose: Divide the archive into categories:
> 
>   * UN and Olympic flags.
>   * Other flags.
>   * Company logos.
>   * Everything else.
> 
> 
> Advantages:
> 
>  * The problem images will almost entirely be located in "other flags". 
>    Others are likely to be caught in the top 3 categories. So, this is
>    a relatively small effort that solves the bulk of the problem.
> 
>  * We avoid issues of who gets to pick what's offensive. We don't have
>    a category called "offensive".
>   
>  * We are not really removing images. They are just being placed in
>    categories.
> 

First of all, the archive is already divided into categories by our tool and 
flags are one of many categories. Your suggestion sounds good. I think it is 
best to not place a value upon categories such as "offensive, horrible, etc"

So, I propose to you three ways to deal with this, mainly as this is a 
distro-specific customization:

1.) Use an older package that doesn't have the flags in it like 0.07.

2.) Provide a tool that clears out all offensive content for the debian 
distribution (this could be as simple as:

for i in `cat censor.txt`; do find . -iname "*$i*" | xargs rm -Rf ; done

Where obviously censor.txt would have a line by line of the offensive possible 
words that could lead to the files. I tested this with the words: nazi and 
basque. Why don't you just run this on our package and get rid of the nazi flags...

3.) Maintain the debian package of open clip art for us.

4.) Contribute a patch to our filtering system to do the changes you propose.


Our resources are spread pretty thin on this project at the moment and we are in 
dire need of people, like yourself, to contribute. I think we would all like for 
Open Clip Art Library to get into the various distributions, and would love to 
see your support in having that happen.

Sincerely,

Jon










-- 
Jon Phillips

USA PH 510.499.0894
jon at rejon.org
http://www.rejon.org

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