Haukur Þorgeirsson wrote:
It's such a
simple solution, I'm a little surprised that fair-use
opponents haven't tried this already. (Of course, if the copyright
holder officially shrugs about WP usage, or defines what they
consider reasonable limits, that would make it harder to argue
that fair use is always unacceptable, so there's a little risk.)
Fair use is fine. I'm an advocate of fair use. The problem is that
*galleries* of proprietary images with no commentary are very unlikely to
be considered fair use even if each image in itself is fair use in the
right context.
Fair use:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pikachu
Unfair use:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Pok%C3%A9mon_images
Come to think of it, why would one say it's not fair use? The intent
is to not make an attractive presentation - they are listed in order
of how the image is named (which is well-nigh random), they are
thumbnails forced into a constant size, and there are no captions or
other descriptive material. One could even argue that the category
aids in ensuring that we only have as many images as we need, for
instance by helping detect duplicates (for which a textual rendering
would be less useful, given the abovementioned randomness of names).
That said, I would support software hackery that would make
non-free-image category pages invisible to spiders; the pages
are only legitimately useful to editors.
It's too bad Alex756 doesn't participate in these discussions
anymore; as an actual lawyer, he was very helpful in explaining
how fair use is supposed to work. You can find a bit of his
discussion on meta still.
Stan