This only works for the case where the copyright owner is also able to perform the upload: do we have statistics on how common this case is?

The gist of this proposal is to keep using email for permissions, but move the content of the permission to an attachment stored on wiki. Is this really worth it? Can't we just provide a form which produces a correct email? Ideally the output of the form would just be a mailto: link with all the necessary content; but many don't know how to use email, so we might need to connect to their mailbox directly.

I think we'd also get requests for the ability to move images back into the permission stash, because some users will inevitably misunderstand or just forget to tick "I need to request permission for this image".

In T88620#1017337, @Nemo_bis wrote:

This only works for the case where the copyright owner is also able to perform the upload: do we have statistics on how common this case is?

I don't see why that would be the case.

The gist of this proposal is to keep using email for permissions, but move the content of the permission to an attachment stored on wiki. Is this really worth it? Can't we just provide a form which produces a correct email? Ideally the output of the form would just be a mailto: link with all the necessary content; but many don't know how to use email, so we might need to connect to their mailbox directly.

Email is somewhat understood as a legal tool for creating contracts, and has some value as an audit trail. Being able to show that the email was sent by the copyright holder, and the copyright holder organization being able to use the email details to figure out (for example) which employee exactly wrote it is important. So I think we need to stick with email and it needs to be sent by the copyright holder from their own mail system.

Using mailto: instead of / next to showing the boilerplate text is certainly possible; I'm not sure about the user-friendlyness of mailto: links.

Email is somewhat understood as a legal tool for creating contracts, and has some value as an audit trail.

Some value compared to what? Sources appreciated. The best tool is direct publication under a free license, according to the Creative Commons website.

In T88620#1092250, @Nemo_bis wrote:

The best tool is direct publication under a free license, according to the Creative Commons website.

I'm not sure about that. What if six month later they redo their website, and another six month later they demand to know by what right do you use the image? Especially in large organizations, where employees come and go, it's easily possible that no record remains that someone gave a permission at some point.

Of course, direct publication + email is better than just email, but if someone is willing to go the direct publication route, they can just copy/paste some boilerplate text, I don't think a tool is warranted for that. But that would put most of the burden on the copyright holder (and thus decreasing the probability of success) - sending a permission email is much simpler than modifying a web page.

Also, this tool should be implemented with reusability in mind - many projects allow non-free images in which case direct publication is not an option.

Refining the workflow and creating a mockup or prototype could be a hackathon project.

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Notes:
This task has some potential, as a possible candidate for a strongly qualified Outreachy/GSoC candidate.

The planned implementation makes sense to at least one OTRS agent, but would definitely need to be verified with a larger number of other OTRS agents, before development progressed.

@Tgr is potentially willing to be the primary mentor, if his other proposed mentor project isn't accepted first.

Note that the linked wishlist discussion was about (part of) the same use case but a different proposal.

Guess I'm doing some task necromancy here, but the current file copyright pemissions workflow is a pet peeve of mine and thought that we could try to improve it somehow during next Wikimedia Hackathon.
I'm not a developer myself, but I'd like to help to make this tool and workflow better so that we don't lose so many file uploads due to a rather obscure process.

What do you think?
Pinging those users that seemed the most active in the thread & other that might be interested to know: @Tgr @Qgil @Nemo_bis @Krenair @Aklapper @Quiddity @Toniher @KRLS

Relgen addressses a lot of these issues, although, being a gadget, it's less integrated.