[Foundation-l] Fair use being badly abused on en.wikipedia

[Brian McNeil]

Nikola Smolenski wrote:

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

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

>So what?

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