[WikiEN-l] Re: [HelpDesk-l] permission

[Fastfission]

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 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Jorge Oliva wrote to helpdesk-l:
> > To whom it may concern:
> >
> > I am a student at Westwood College in Los Angeles trying to get a
> > bachelor degree in Video Game Art and Design. We were told to do a
> > poster in one of our favorite video games. I chose to do it in the
> > diffrence between StreetFighter, and I would like to ask for permision
> > to borrow some of the pictures that are in your website.  This poster
> > would be only used for educational purposes.
> >
>
> This is where allowing "Fair use" images is getting us... what do I tell
> them? "Sorry, that's actually a copyright infringment which we can use
> via a legal loophole, but nobody else is allowed to"?
>
> I thought the idea was to allow "maximal reuse" and "free content", not
> "copyright situations so complicated that nobody can understand them"!
>
> --
> Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
> Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
> "We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
>
>
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