[WikiEN-l] Google Earth copyright (now that you bring it up)

[Justin Cormack]

On 20 Jan 2006, at 23:42, Stan Shebs wrote:

> Justin Cormack wrote:
>
>>> Now, what does the Abbey Road album cover add to its article?
>>> Quite a bit it turns out - the article even has a section entitled
>>> "The famous photograph".
>>
>>
>> Yes, but these few real uses are swamped by the rubbish ones.
>
> If it's a matter of principle, then there are no "real uses" that
> are acceptable, no exceptions possible.

I am perfectly happy with genuine fair use. However we have no
procedures to enforce it for images so we have perhaps a few hundred
fair uses of images and tens of thousands that are not. Its better
to delete them all and perhaps start again with a better procedure.
After all deleting them doesnt matter as they are easily available from
the copyright holders.

>>
>> We dont have to illustrate everything. You can take photos of the
>> stars at film openings, or prints on the walk of fame, there are
>> lots of free photos out there.
>
> "Prints on the walk of fame"? Exactly how does that clue people
> in about Darth Vader's menacing appearance, or how Yoda and
> Obi-wan are made-up to imitate the Campbellian archetype? If
> pictures are just decorative, then why not just eliminate all
> of them? (And yes, I know there are those on the far end of
> the sigma curve who think that's a great idea.)

The sixteen non free pictures in the Darth Vadar article dont
illustrate this very well either. Yes, some things are not
going to be well illustrated in a free encyclopaedia compared
to otehrs. Live with it.

>>
>> 99.99% of the images labelled as fair use are not. 99.99% of the
>> fair use text is. A few errors either way are not important to
>> the goal of making a free encyclopaedia. The lies and blatent
>> copyright violation in the images is.
>
> If it's a matter of principle, then no fair-use quotes are acceptable,
> ever. If it's a 99.99% issue, then you're saying you accept the
> basic principle that fair use is allowable in an otherwise-free
> encyclopedia, and we're just talking about doing a better job of
> enforcing policy. Which is it?

As discussed elsewhere, quotes are generally quite clear with respect
to legality, fair dealing. They are small parts of works. Images are
in themselves complete works.

>> I too can find a handful of fair use images. But I have yet to see
>> something in say [[Category:Promotional images]] that is actually
>> a promotional image (and there is really no justification for us
>> having real promos anyway as we dont accept permission images). Its
>> a blanket copyvio category. There are thousands of them, and more
>> added every day.
>
> The real irony here is that while we're apparently getting daily
> complaints about the *text* of people's bios, we don't ever seem to
> get any complaints about the *images* in them. When WPians have sent
> email asking about images, the response is always "sure, use it all
> you like". So in the big project of tightening up fair use, I put
> basic sorting, policy clarification, and response time at the top,
> then clearing out photos copyrighted by photographers and news
> organizations, and only then am I going to worry about clarifying
> the status of celebrity headshots. Like every other big WP project,
> it doesn't work to declare failure because not everything can be
> fixed in one day.

Sorry are pictures of celebrities not "copyrighted by photographers and
news organizations"? Those were only an example where the entire
category is bogus as almost none are publicity photos in the sense
that the category claims.

Like "The use of a small number of low-resolution Pokémon images to  
illustrate articles about the subjects of the images in question on  
the English-language Wikipedia, hosted on servers in the United  
States by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, is believed to fall  
under the fair use clause of United States copyright law"

For large values of small.

Justinc