On Wed, 2005-11-09 at 14:30 +1030, Alphax wrote: It's not really a "legal loophole," per se; it's a group of restrictions upon copyright law. That said, I agree with your point. Having totally Free content on Wikipedia would be great. But, reality seldom conforms to ideals. As long as the vast majority of the world's content producers adhere to restrictive copyright schemes, it's either fair use or no use at all. I, personally, would rather have non-redistributable content than none at all, at least for illuminative purposes. Of course, reasonable fair use is necessary. Authors who think Wikipedia needs images of every single character in a work, no matter how minor, are obviously overstepping the bounds of fair use. And yes, fair use does complicate our situation somewhat. I think the benefits of responsible fair use outweigh the downsides, however. And remember, there will always be people uninformed about copyright or Wikipedia in general asking if they can do this or that. We do have Wikipedia: pages for explanations. -- Christopher Larberg ([[w:en:User:Slowking Man]])

Two comments, hopefully not already made: 1. This copyright situation is not that hard to understand. You can tell these guys that the copyright is likely held by Capcom, but that we use it without permission under the "Fair Use" clause in U.S. copyright law. They should be able to determine if their use of it would also be "fair use" as well. Since they are doing it for an art project (basically their own private use), it's probably fine. Or they could contact Capcom and ask permission, which will probably be granted if they emphasize that this won't be displayed outside of one classroom. 2. It *is* a loophole in a sense, though. I've been somewhat fretting about this for awhile and not sure where I stand on it. Here's my argument: A. Wikipedia is not supposed to have Wikipedia-only or encyclopedia-only or non-profit-only media. B. But we allow Fair Use media. C. But most of our legitimate Fair Use claims rides on the fact that we are a non-profit encyclopedia. D. So we end up allowing a lot of things which are unlikely to be usable except in non-profit contexts. E. Which seems to contradict A. Now Fair Use is a bit more than just not-for-profit, of course -- that's just one point in the equation. But in the end the law *is* skewed to allow that sort of use over for-profit, commercial, non-critical, non-encyclopedic use. So by deferring to a law which trends towards non-profit use, and taking advantage of the fact that we are non-profit and an encyclopedia, we end up having a huge amount of media which is de facto non-profit only. Maybe I've gotten tripped up here at some point, which I'd be glad to see pointed out. I feel that our Fair Use policy ends up being very much neither in the letter or the spirit of Jimbo's fatwa against non-commercial only images. Perhaps I worry too much, though. FF On 11/8/05, Alphax <alphasigmax(a)gmail.com> wrote: