Firstly, I am aware of that. However the user in
question never bothered to inform people, causing a
lot of anger. Secondly, legal advice I have says that
it wrong. A template image unrelated to an article is
definitely illegal. However a template in effect
bridging articles operates under a different legal
framework and a relevant image in a template in an
article space, where it does nothing more than
visually facilitate a link and carries no claim of
ownership or implicit meaning other than that
facilitatory link, is covered by fair use according to
a senior lawyer I know.
The relevant note on fair use on Wikipedia fails to
distinguish between relevant visual usage and
presumptuous ownership. The former is why fairuse is
OK in articles. In a visually based links-run
encyclopædia, templates follow the same role as links
in articles and the use of graphics and image to
enable that link is not as suggested in the quote
below.
--- Andrew Gray <shimgray(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 31/10/05, Tom Cadden <thomcadden(a)yahoo.ie>
wrote:
- If you look at his "contributions"
you'll see
he's
been doing this to a lot of templates lately
where
it's quite clear (IMO) fair-use allows the images
to
be used.
For what it's worth:
"[Fair use] material should *only* be used in the
article namespace.
They should *never* be used on templates (including
stub templates and
navigation boxes) or on user pages."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fair_use#Policy
--
- Andrew Gray
andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk
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