[Clipart] found this while surfing

[Nathan Eady]

> On Sun, Mar 6, 2011 at 9:17 AM, jon at rejon.org <jon at rejon.org> wrote:
>
>> btw, we should not be naive either...there are ppl who will try to
>> submit bad stuff in order to create problems too....delete delete
>> delete!

chovynz <chovynz at gmail.com> writes:

> There's no delete function yet. And Bassel is not convinced we
> should delete records either.

Barring receipt of an actual DMCA take-down notice (or a serious
disk-space shortage), I would not be in favor of irrevocable deletion
as such.  The mere existence of that kind of delete functionality in
the web UI would pretty much guarantee accidental deletion of wanted
materials, and there is also the potential for deliberate abuse.  It's
just not a good idea.  If we have a special case where real deletion
becomes really actually necessary, someone with a shell acount can do
it by hand, but that may *never* be needed, and it certainly won't be
needed on a day-to-day basis.

I am, however, very definitely in favor of marking them pd_issue and
copyright or trademark or whatever and hiding them so they don't turn
up in search results, if we have any reason to believe they are not
legitimately in the public domain.  I do this whenever I notice them.
(I think I did this to several versions of the Debian logo a week or
two ago.)  

That way, if we later discover we were mistaken about any image, or if
we nixed the wrong one, or if the three-thousand-and-ninety-third
person who uploads Tux turns out to actually be Larry Ewing and he's
really intending to release it into the PD, or whatever...  the tags
and so forth can be easily undone, no harm no foul.  The ability to 
undo is good.

Also, assuming the software tracks who does what, any deliberate abuse
that should arise can be dealt with.  (Everything they do can be
straightforwardly reversed, and since only people who have been made
librarians can do this stuff, a user whose account is suspended for
such abuses cannot just easily create a fresh account and keep redoing
it.  They would have to convince someone to make their new account a
librarian, _each_ time an account is suspended.)

And yeah, if there's a particular user and we have to keep repeatedly
explaining what PD means to him and he never gets it and keeps
uploading non-PD material, there are ways to deal with that too.  If
it becomes a sufficiently serious problem, newly created accounts
could be marked automatically with some flag, and newly uploaded
clipart by such authors could be automatically flagged as pending
review until a librarian takes a look at it and takes off the flag;
when a librarian notices that a given user has consistently uploaded
original or genuinely-PD content, their "needs-review" flag could be
taken off.  If the user later _develops_ a discernment problem, the
flag could be put back.  Hopefully we won't need to go quite as far as
all that, but even if we do, it should still be possible to handle it
all without an irreversable-nuke button, IMO.

-- 
Nathan Eady
Galion Public Library