[Commons-l] Template:Non-free_album_cover on en.wikipedia

[David Gerard]

On 06/11/2007, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 06/11/2007, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:

> > Because of some rather legalistic interpretations of the policy, the
> > template you applied to the image which has *all appearances of a
> > rationale* and which probably says exactly what you would say for a
> > rationale if you spent a long time thinking about it .... isn't
> > actually considered a  rationale.

> I sometimes wonder if this is an elaborate trick to put people off
> using non-free images, simply by making it such a hassle that it's not
> worth their time...


There's probably a bit of that. The problem is that we have a firehose
of nonfree stuff being uploaded under the hitherto-unknown "I wanna!"
clause of US fair use law. So cleaning it up is getting a bit harsher.
I'm a big fan of fair use when encyclopedically useful (and we could
get away with *FAR* more than we do), but the floods of crap and the
whinier flooders are really quite, um, annoying.


- d.