It's more then just our legal risk in keeping those images and text. Under US copyright law, we should be legally allowed to use some copyrighted material under fair use guidelines without causing any problems. There are several problems with fair use: 1) Fair Use only applies in the US and a small handful of other countries. In countries where fair use is not legal, all instances of it are considered copyright infringement. In these countries, it is not legal to print or distribute wikibooks containing fair use media. 2) Fair use, or other limited licensing (such as "the author allows this image to be used on wikibooks only") reduces our ability to print, distribute, and modify our texts. Derivative works, a cornerstone of the GFDL are not compatable with fair use, and using two incompatable licenses on a single aggregate project (such as a wikibook) is simply not possible. 3) Many people assume that text or an image can be released under fair use when it can't be. Images that are uploaded under "fair use" are usually (as you pointed out) not properly tagged or referenced. These instances of misuse do constitute copyright infringement, and that could bring lawsuits. We allowed fair use for a pretty long time on our project, but it isn't the kind of fight that we should be pursuing any longer. There are too many problems with it. -
--Andrew Whitworth (Whiteknight)
From: "Matthew Benedict" mattb112885@gmail.com Reply-To: Wikimedia textbook discussion textbook-l@lists.wikimedia.org To: textbook-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Textbook-l] Textbook-l Digest, Vol 33, Issue 8 Date: Fri, 16 Feb 2007 12:07:29 -0500
Now that I have thought some more about it, I do feel that the use of fair use images should be limited, but the problem is where do we draw the line? We'd have to ask ourselves if the value of using the images in the book outweighs the legal risk of listing it under fair use, especially if the books will eventually be published in some manner, as I presume is one eventual goal for any book on the project. I think that only in extreme cases (such as maybe those european history images) should fair use be presumed, and these cases should be clearly defined, perhaps on a case-by-case or strict categorical basis.
As for textual quotations, I think (correct me if I'm wrong) that the presumption of fair use for these (provided they are properly cited of course) is more common than the presumption of fair use for images. If we're going to do that we'll need some kind of standard method to describe the rationale for the fair use argument, like wikipedia has for images (i.e. this is a screenshot used only for illustration, this is a low-res company logo used to show what it looks like, etc).
Speaking of citation, one problem with current fair use images is that a lot of them don't really cite the source properly; i.e. who created it? From what source was it derived? This information should be in the image page, but often they just have descriptions of what the image is, not where it came from or who the current copyright holder is, which can cause problems of its own.
Regards,
Mattb112885
On 2/16/07, textbook-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org textbook-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org wrote:
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Today's Topics:
- Regarding fair use (Iamunknown)
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Iamunknown iamunknown@gmail.com To: textbook-l@lists.wikimedia.org Date: Fri, 16 Feb 2007 00:52:49 -0700 Subject: [Textbook-l] Regarding fair use I really don't want fair use to go totally away, but I agree that it
should
be significantly limited. The clause, "Because of our commitment to free content, this non-free media should not be used when it is reasonably possible to replace with free media that would serve the same
educational
purpose," in Kat Walsh's statement comes to mind. While I have expreseed concern on-wiki and on-mailing list before about unlicensed images, many which, if licensed properly, would remained unlicensed and used under
fair
use, I think that we should not outright ban unlicensed content used
under
fair use. In particular, we should allow very very limited use of
non-free
media when it would be practically impossible to use free media -- the
media
used in the European History wikibook comes to mind -- and for small
textual
quotations. What are everyone else's feelings?
-Iamunknown
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