On 1/28/06, Haukur Þorgeirsson <haukurth(a)hi.is> wrote:
At least that's something. Here's a part of the text:
"The use of a small number of low-resolution Pokémon images to illustrate
articles about the subjects of the images in question ... is believed to
fall under the fair use clause ... Any other uses of these images, on
Wikipedia or elsewhere, may be copyright infringement."
This works for the articles but the category page itself does not have a
small number of images, it has 200 images. And the images there are not
illustrating articles, they're just there, without any commentary. I just
don't see how this can be fair use under our usual rationales. If it was a
maintenance page inaccessible to the public then that would be one thing
but it's actually a perfectly accessible page which you can even find with
a Google search.
They're thumbnails, they are in no particular order, they are clearly just a
database backend. I really, really doubt it would ever be a legal problem in
a way the images in the articles aren't.
I agree, removing the category is definitely not the way to go. Nor do I
want to delete all fair use images or anything like
that. What I'd like is
a technical option which allows us to turn off auto-display of thumbnails
for selected categories.
This would still defeat the goal of monitoring. Not being able to see at a
glance what shouldn't belong in a category is a bad idea. Removing the
thumbnails puts one at the mercy of the filename or checking each image
individually.
Lesser of two evils, in my opinion. And likely a very low legal risk.
FF