[WikiEN-l] Re: yet another image lost for posterity

[Fastfission]

On 11/28/05, Anthere <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Given that images used on used pages are unlikely to end up in a DVD or
> a book, I seriously doubt who would suffer copyright infringement
> attacks for images hosted on community pages.
>
> It strikes me as odd, that we authorize fair use on encyclopedic content
> (which is likely to be reused and to irritate copyright holders), while
> forbidding it on personal pages (where it is unlikely to be much troubles).
>
> Overall, our license issues strike me as being more confusing and messy
> every day that goes by.

It strikes me that you don't really know what fair use is. It might
aid you if you read our page on the fair use policy at [[WP:FU]]
first, because you seem confused on a few legal points which are not
terribly difficult but most people haven't been exposed to them.

The reason people have been cracking down on fair use tagging is
because if something is tagged as such but is not actually "fair use",
then it is a copyright violation and puts us in a legally bad
position. People have been generously mopping up some of the simple
cases (i.e. where images are claimed as "fair use" but are not used in
an encyclopedia article) with the sole intention of helping Wikipedia
keep a "clean" legal status. The goal is to avoid getting sued and
having Wikipedia donations spent on lawyers rather than new servers.

I don't want to sound unsympathetic, but I'm having a hard time
understanding why you absolutely needed to have an image whose
copyright was owned by someone else and not released freely kept on
the Wikipedia servers even though it wasn't being used.

FF