On Jan 7, 2008 2:03 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote: "They would never sue!" is a very poor position to take.

On Jan 7, 2008 3:17 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote: Fine position to take except you'll eventually be wrong, and they might not be so kind as to ask politely first, but instead drag us into court first. Would you be willing to front the costs for the Foundation when (not if...we have too many fair use images for that to be an if) it happens?

I'm less concerned with the Foundation being sued (because we are protected in most cases, both by our ability to respond to takedown notices and our educational purpose) and more concerned by the vulnerability of content reusers to suit. Our policy on free content is not to protect *us* - if that were the case, we could just request permission to use whole troves of content and be done. The policy protects those who, through our license, reuse our content for their own purposes. They are potentially much more liable to suit and this liability for them violates our goal to assemble a completely reusable base of knowledge. The best way to protect those who wish to utilize our content under its license is to ensure that we adhere to it - or change it. The best way to ensure our compliance is by guarding the insertion of non-free content - not laboriously deleting it once its eventually noticed. Nathan _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

On Jan 7, 2008 2:03 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote: "They would never sue!" is a very poor position to take.

On 07/01/2008, George Herbert <george.herbert(a)gmail.com> wrote: Note, by the way, they can not only lose, but lose and be spanked. e.g. some suits brought by the Church of Scientology, where they had attorney's fees awarded against them and were reprimanded by the judge. After a few active years, the CoS has been spanked so hard so often it hasn't brought a copyright suit in several years.

On Jan 7, 2008 6:33 PM, Nathan <nawrich(a)gmail.com> wrote: If fair use really violates the license (and I can understand how the point could be argued) then we should be done with it and remove all fair use. However, Wikimedia currently operates on an assumption that the two are not intrinsically incompatible. Resolving the legal ambiguity is exactly one of the areas where establishing a legal precedent would be useful. To the other part, I'd say removing fair use threatens our mission by handing power back to the copyright holders and unnecessarily limiting our ability to fully discuss some topics. It's not that I am ignoring previous points, but rather that I have a fundementally different opinion of the role of fair use within the scope of WMF's mission than many of the people here. I believe there should be no greater goal for WMF than to distribute high quality, free-of-cost knowledge throughout the world. The "fair use" system of the US and the similar but different "fair dealing" systems of other countries provide mechanisms for disseminating images and knowledge we would never be able to access otherwise, and we should embrace that opportunity rather than shy away from it. Excersing those rights to otherwise inaccessible content compliment our mission rather than detract from it. -Robert A. Rohde _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

Hi, On 08/01/2008, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com> wrote: Fair that Fair I believe you are mixing use of fair use images (and EDP) with fair use as a much broader concept. Fair use is (AFAICT, IANAL) an instance of "fair practice" mentioned even in the Berne Convention. Without fair use, you couldn't even include textual quotations. And an encyclopedia that does not cite anyone is hardly a valuable encyclopedia, IMHO. -- [[cs:User:Mormegil | Petr Kadlec]] _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

Hoi, I do not think so. Please read what this thread is about. thanks,

If everyone who got into this argument went out and took a free picture a day to replace fair use ones we use now, we'd have replaced a lot of the ones we can actually practically replace. Apparently it is easier to come argue here about it over and over again rather than actually solve it?

On Jan 8, 2008 5:03 PM, geni <geniice(a)gmail.com> wrote: All episode screenshots are non-replaceable too. All album covers are not replaceable too. All book covers are not replaceable too (well, except the old ones).

If that's an argument to retain fair use images, then we need to liberalize fair use across the entire project. The criteria isn't just whether something is replaceable or not.

If that was the sole criteria, we'd have millions upon millions of fair use images.

The vast majority of the remaining fair use images are not possible to replace with free images.

On Jan 10, 2008 7:37 PM, Andrew Gray <shimgray(a)gmail.com> wrote: I agree with this sentiment entirely. Just because an image is irreplacable does not mean it has intrinsic value. For instance, the cover image of a book or CD or DVD is hardly "important". That is, unless there is something special and unique about that particular cover that makes it worthy of pointing out especially. On en.wikibooks, the biggest hurdle we have is in the software guidebooks for proprietart software packages. For instance, it's difficult to teach Adobe Photoshop without including some screenshots of the interface. (we have a book on GIMP too, before anybody complains). Fair use should be invoked when the image is essential to the book or article. If it is not essential, then it is mere decoration, and fair use seems like a bit of a gamble to employ on decorations. --Andrew Whitworth _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

I've said this before, and appear to have to say it again. This encyclopedia's value lies not in our creation effort or the Foundation's existence - we're a service, and we're providing that service to normal people out in the world who want to look information up.

Normal people overwhelmingly positively react much better to visual information and visual / text pairings rather than bland text. In magazines and newspapers, articles with pictures are read and comprehended much more than pure text articles. Images in other encyclopedias are a major "selling point".

The last few arguments in this thread fall into a false dichotomy - you're trying to ignore or depreciate the value of images in making educational content reader-friendly and reader-attractive, in order to bolster your arguments in the "how free is free?" debate. This is a horrible oversight and renders your stated position untenable.

On Jan 11, 2008 12:17 PM, Todd Allen <toddmallen(a)gmail.com> wrote: I've said this before, and appear to have to say it again. This encyclopedia's value lies not in our creation effort or the Foundation's existence - we're a service, and we're providing that service to normal people out in the world who want to look information up. Normal people overwhelmingly positively react much better to visual information and visual / text pairings rather than bland text. In magazines and newspapers, articles with pictures are read and comprehended much more than pure text articles. Images in other encyclopedias are a major "selling point". Images are not just fluff or decoration. They are an integral part of making the encyclopedia something that our Customers like to read and will remember and value. I believe in the power of text - I've written loads of pictureless prose over the years in many venues. But I also know what people respond to, when you're talking about "general public", both from my own ancedotal encounters and from reading studies on learning comprehension (I used to work for a computer training company whose founder had a doctorate in education psychology...). Images work. The last few arguments in this thread fall into a false dichotomy - you're trying to ignore or depreciate the value of images in making educational content reader-friendly and reader-attractive, in order to bolster your arguments in the "how free is free?" debate. This is a horrible oversight and renders your stated position untenable. You all are fine with and encourage the use of open content images. For the same reasons that those image content are valuable to the readers, fair use image content is also valuable to the readers. The issue of "how free is free?" is a legitimate one. I feel for our downstream mirrors - they are clearly much more exposed to liability than we are, though I suspect that US fair use would still largely apply to them as it would to any other educational / reference content focused site. And we ourselves are potentially exposed to liability for true violations of the image policies that stand now, which we all know do happen regularly and sometimes are not spotted and corrected for some time (if at all, to date, in some cases). I am all for the proliferation of true free content (GFDL, CC, public domain, whatever) and I've spent a moderate fraction of my total Wikipedia time on creating various free content illustrations and a handful of photos. But this is not and can not be a debate about whether images belong on Wikipedia and are valuable here. That is and should remain a closed case, with a strong affirmative "yes" answer. It is not to me an acceptable debating tactic in the fair use policy discussions. -- -george william herbert george.herbert(a)gmail.com _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

On Friday 11 January 2008 04:35, Andrew Whitworth wrote: I find cover image of a book a part of essential information about this book that I want to see if I want to know about the book. At least for me, as a reader, it is important. The same for CD/DVD covers, movie posters and whatnot.

On Saturday 12 January 2008 09:03, Pedro Sanchez wrote:

> "I find it useful " is not likely to fly in a court

So what?

Nikola Smolenski wrote: Wikinews had this fight. I unilaterally amended the copyright message at the foot of every page and had no dispute. It now reads: "All text created after September 25, 2005 is available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License unless otherwise specified. Copyright terms on images may vary, please check individual image pages prior to duplication." There is a warning that we use fair use, and for a news source this is *very* important. I've had fights with people from Commons who are 'more zealous' about application of Fair Use, and realistically nobody has answered my fundamental question which is the time issue. If we write an article on Hilary Clinton and can only get a fair use image in the 12-36 hours the story is current, is it appropriate to replace that image in 10 years with a current image? Remember, this would be on an article dated January 12, 2008 with the potential replacement being in 2018. I have very little to say on how this impacts other projects such as the English Wikipedia. I've uploaded album covers there myself, I think they belong there. Brian McNeil _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l