Benutzer:Nd/Euro
Hinweis: Um Schwierigkeiten bzgl. der GNU FDL für den Empfänger zu vermeiden, ist dieser Artikel als gemeinfrei (public domain) zu betrachten
- To: info@ecb.int
- Subject: Euro-design and copyright
Dear Sir or Madam,
my name is [NAME] and I am one of many contributors to the free encyclopedia Wikipedia. One of the articles I am currently working on is the article about the Euro (c.f. http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro).
Naturally, such an article benefits a lot from depictions of coins, banknotes and security features. It therefore features some pictures; the Wikipedia authors believe that all of these pictures adhere the reproduction regime stated in Bulletin EU 10-2001 / Economic and monetary policy (9/13) (http://europa.eu.int/abc/doc/off/bull/en/200110/p103009.htm) and in the Council Regulation (EC) No 3604/93 of 13 December 1993 (http://europa.eu.int/euro/dossiers/00278/html/pdf/EN_247_250.pdf).
Wikipedia is a multilingual, universal encylopedia that is freely usable for anyone on the Internet. Its German branch may be accessed by the address http://de.wikipedia.org. One special feature of it is that anybody may create and edit articles, even without registration. You may try out this by e.g. editing the English article about the ECB by entering the address http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Central_Bank and clicking on "edit this page".
Another feature of the Wikipedia is how it is licensed. It uses the GNU Free Documentation License (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl.html). This license aims at keeping information freely acccessible. It is therefore extremly liberal on derived works and only requires to mention the original authors as well as to put the derived work under the same license.
Please note that this of course does not affect other legal regulations such as the laws against counterfeit money or the reproduction regulations stated in the before mentioned EU bulletin. However, the ECB and its associated national banks are the copyright holders of the design of Euro banknotes. The Wikipedia authors therefore would like to know if the copyright regime of the ECB is compatible with our license. If this is not the case for some of the pictures, we of course will remove them from our website imediately.
Yours truly, [NAME]