Anthony DiPierro wrote: If that were true, then one could draw original comic strips or animated television cartoons featuring Star Wars characters without needing any kind of license or permission from anybody. But a quick Googling for ' movie merchandising copyright ' turns up sites like http://www.marklitwak.com/articles/general/movie_merchandising.html , in which Mark Litwak, Esq. generously offers a sample merchandising license, wherein we read "... Licensor grants to Licensee [...] the exclusive right, license and privilege to utilize the names, characters, artists' portrayal of characters, likenesses and visual representations as included in Picture ..." and so forth. In other words, the pros at this have already figured out all the tricky angles. :-) Stan

Anthony DiPierro wrote: I quoted the license specifically because it mentioned "names" and "likenesses", in other words redrawing the imagery doesn't get you off the hook here, and if your excuse is that you're just doing it for use in the encyclopedia, then you've come right back to relying on the same old fair use argument. Don't think you can outsmart these guys so easily, they have a whole industry based on licensing of copyrighted material. In fact, the most intelligent course of action might be to contact them and just *ask* what amount of content they would like to see. If they say zero, then fine, the fair-use haters have their reason to flush it all, but my guess is that they don't want to lose the free visibility, and will give us guidelines. Of course, if they say "use as much as you want, we love Wikipedia", fair-use haters lose one of their key arguments... :-) Stan

On 1/21/06, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal(a)inbox.org> wrote: I think it is worth pointing out that copyright law (and trademark law) affects text and images (and other forms of media) differently. It is very easy to make a copyright-safe version of a textual account; it is very hard in most cases to make copyright-safe versions of images or visual-based media unless they are themselves based on "basic facts" (i.e. a diagram of some physical principle). The only way I know of to make "free" versions of copyrighted things would be as knock-offs. But that not only wouldn't help our purposes at all, but it would itself skate far closer to legal action than a "fair use" claim probably would. But that's just a speculation. FF

On 1/23/06, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal(a)inbox.org> wrote: Well, that was just an example. But I am talking about things like scientific facts, which are not copyrightable. If I use someone's drawing of an atom to make my own drawing of an atom, that's fine, even more so if I make my own graphical choices about it in the process. What's copyrighted is the specific presentation, and whatever "creative" decisions went into it, not the underlying "factual" information. Mickey Mouse is not quite the same thing as this, I don't think. Here the underlying information is a fictional creation, based entirely on someone's creativity. Hence it is copyrightable "all the way down", as I understand it. Again, copyright affects media differently and I think assuming that it shouldn't is entirely wrong. It is very easy to make a "copyright safe" paragraph about World War II based on a secondary source (take the basic information, rewrite it in your own words, cite the original source as a reference). It is not easy if even possible to make a "copyright safe" version of a photograph of World War II. The [[clean room design]] is another example of copyright affecting different media differently. Programming code is more like text than it is like an image -- if I find another way to do the same thing you do, without copying your code, I don't infringe on the copyright. (Software _patents_ are a different matter entirely, of course, which is why they are so controversial.) But about your specific hypothetical: what is copyrighted in a picture of Mickey Mouse is the creative aspect of it, not the specific lines and whatnot. If you strive to copy that , no matter what machinations you add in the execution is going to be ruled infringement. Again, if the opposite were true then you'd see tons and tons of knockoffs of every copyrighted image on the market. FF

I wonder at what point an image is so downgraded by thumbnailing as to be exempt from any challenge to fair use. In the absence of primary images we can use with PD or GFDL tags, then there should be some way that we can use low-quality images to illustrate an article so that whoever owns the high-quality copyright image does not feel that their potential market has been targeted. An external link pointing to the original copyright source would give readers access to a higher-quality image. But if quoting some percentage of a published text work for the purpose of commentary or reference is acceptable, then surely we can find some percentage of an image quality that would be generally acceptable. Is a 100 by 100 pixel thumbnail of a 1000 by 1000 pixel copyright image acceptable? That's only 1% of the original! I ask because there are some articles that would be well served by even a low-quality image, but it is all but impossible to find an image that we can use. An example would be in the case of an air disaster, where photographs would almost certainly be the property of news agencies. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Tenerife_Disaster_Collision_aftermath_27_ March_1977.png is one example, where the image is scanned in at low resolution. Peter (Skyring)

... Both are useful. The CG image shows how the accident happened in a way that no photograph can, simply because there was no camera present at an appropriate vantage point and the visibility was very poor. The photograph of the burning wing illustrates the conditions at the crash scene. I don't think anyone who has ever travelled on an airliner can look at that photograph and not get a sense of how horrific the crash must have been, in a way that is going to be difficult to convey in text alone. Obviously none of them, and I will not defend the uploader for picking that usage, except to say that they have only been editing for a few months and could perhaps use guidance more than criticism. However, thanks for spotting it, and perhaps you or some other public-spirited editor could take appropriate action? Do you have any useful views on the question I asked about thumbnailing? Perhaps there is a detailed guideline already in place, but I haven't been able to spot it in perusing [[WP:FU]], where policy serials two and three are vague: "2. The material should not be used in a manner that would likely replace the original market role of the original copyrighted media; our use of copyrighted material should not make it so that one no longer needs to purchase the actual product. For example, large copyrighted photographs from agencies that make their income selling photographs, for example, would likely not be "fair use" as it would be undermining the ability of the copyright holder to make money off of their work. 3. The amount of copyrighted work used should be as little as possible. Low-resolution images should be used instead of high-resolution images (especially images that are so high-resolution that they could be used for piracy). Do not use multiple images or media clips if one will serve the purpose adequately." Is there some acceptable percentage, or do we just have to hope that a court will say that 5% or 10% or whatever is degraded enough that we can use it? Peter (Skyring)

On 1/24/06, Peter Mackay <peter.mackay(a)bigpond.com> wrote: Well, it's certainly possible, because when I saw the image I was wholly unimpressed. OK, a wing is burning. That's what I would have imagined anyway if you told me "a plane crashed". I stand by my opinion that I don't think there is any encyclopedic knowledge added by that picture. I think the article would be as good with the image as without it. Better, in fact, because the article wouldn't be more free. If horrifying people really is that important, I'm sure it'd be possible to create a good re-enactment, complete with a simulation of the burning and carnage and all that fun stuff. Yes, it'd take a lot of time and effort. Frankly, I don't think it'd be worth it in this case. But I take that to mean that it's not worth it to just use someone else's work either. What is the appropriate action? Should I remove the image from the article? Do you want to bet someone adds it back if I do? It's not worth my time, especially as it's only one image of many. In fact, the other image is equally bad (moreso, I'd argue, because it's less educational). "It is believed that the use of low-resolution images of newspaper pages to illustrate either the publication of the article or issue in question, with the publication name either visible on the image itself or written in the image description above, on the English-language Wikipedia, hosted on servers in the United States by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, qualifies as fair use under United States copyright law." ([[Image:Tenerife Disaster Collision aftermath 27 March 1977.png]]). These tags have become almost useless, because it is quite common that they describe things completely unrelated to the image in question. This image is not being used to illustrate the publication of the article or issue in question. There's no reason it should be in Wikipedia. When someone writes a really good, but proprietary, explanation of a new scientific theory, you don't just copy it into Wikipedia, even as a placeholder until someone writes a free replacement. There's no reason it should be done with images either. My point, in case you don't see what I'm getting at, is that it's not about this image. It's about whatever flaw there is in the system that allows these images to sit there for months with completely inappropriate tags. I'm not actually sure what it is that caused this flaw, nor am I sure how to fix it. It's not *just* the fact that it's a wiki and that wikis sometimes contain glaring mistakes. If I had mentioned a glaring flaw in an article it'd be fixed by now. It's gotta be something else. I'd love to hear your suggestions, or even if you just think there isn't such a flaw in the first place. (Maybe it's the fact that this is considered meta-data. People argue over policies by modifying the tag, all the while not paying attention to the fact that they're causing the tag to be completely misleading.) Not really, but I'll give it my best anyway: "I wonder at what point an image is so downgraded by thumbnailing as to be exempt from any challenge to fair use." No, there's no acceptable percentage. Fair use in the United States is extremely subjective. It doesn't just matter how much you're using, but who you are, how you're using it, how good your lawyer is, what kind of mood the judge is in, etc. In fact, I'd say a large part of the advantage of a free encyclopedia is supposed to be that it removes such questions from having to be worried about. Anthony