Amen. This is the goal of Wikipedia's fair use policy -- proper fair
use when necessary, well thought out, with the issues at stake well
understood.
A number of people have occasionally taken calls for a restricted fair
use policy to imply copyright paranoia or some sort of feebleness in
standing up for fair use rights. This is of course not anyone's goal.
In my mind, the more careful, deliberate, and (hopefully) informed we
are in the implementation of fair use policies, the more confidence we
can have in our use of fair use images, and the more empowered we
actually are in the end. Poor or pointless invocations of fair use
strengthen nothing but the arguments and hysterical claims of those
many parties out there whose goals are to make copyright law as
binding and restrictive as possible.
FF
On 1/20/06, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Chris Jenkinson wrote:
Wikipedia should rely upon the contributions of
its editors, not on
material others have created, if possible. Of course it's impossible to
get a new photo of a historical event, taken by a Wikipedian, but we
should make sure that all fair use images which aren't of past events
should be replaced with new images which Wikipedians have contributed.
That's what Wikipedia is about to me.
I concur.
I definitely don't want fair use images to go from en: completely. My
favourite article with heavy use of fair use images is [[Xenu]]. One
is the cover of "Dianetics", illustrating a point in the article about
Scientology book covers after the Xenu story was put into Scientology;
one is the [[Sea Org]] logo, which also comes from the Xenu story; and
one is a sample of L. Ron Hubbard's handwriting, showing the only
known example of the word "Xenu" in his own handwriting. None of those
three are particularly replaceable. But their use in that article is
pretty clearly academic fair use, and I did run them past Jimbo before
it was made a front page feature, given Scientology's famously strong
legal defence of anything it sees as a copyright or trademark
violation. So far we haven't heard a peep out of Scientology on the
matter, and they're well aware of the article (and at least one staff
member has edited it), so I would presume they accept legal action on
the matter would be a losing proposition (though I believe they have a
few years before we can be sure laches has kicked in).
- d.
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