Microsoft has licensing agreements with multiple book publishers, and even
has it's own "Microsoft Press" that makes good money selling books about
Microsoft applications. To that effect, I would be highly surprised if
microsoft gave us any special permission to include it's images in our
books.
I think at this point, the best thing that we can do is to wait and see what
exactly the WMF has to say on this matter before we do anything. I will
change back the text of [[Wikibooks:Copyrights]] because that is an enforced
policy, but I won't change the text of [[Wikibooks:Fair use policy]] and
[[Wikibooks:Image use policy]], because those are just proposals at this
point.
If the WMF chooses to ban such works that are "with permission", then any
efforts on our part to secure such images will have been futile. Once we
know what the WMF has to say on the issue officially, we can decide if and
by how much we want to differ from their standpoint (without being less
restrictive).
--Andrew Whitworth
From: Iamunknown <iamunknown(a)gmail.com>
Reply-To: Wikimedia textbook discussion <textbook-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
To: "Wikimedia textbook discussion" <textbook-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: Re: [Textbook-l] Regarding fair use
Date: Fri, 16 Feb 2007 18:27:21 -0700
I totally agree that if the WMF board decides to outright ban fair use
then we have no choice but to comply. I, on a certain level, hope that
they do not. I think what we should focus more on, however, is asking
permission from copyright holders to use their copyrighted media.
For example, Webaware recently created {{Microsoft screenshot}} out of
his recent research into Microsoft policy. Microsoft screenshots are
still essentially fair use: for our purposes as an educational
website, we can technically use them for free, but because our goal is
also to allow for downstream use in any context, it is definitely
-not- free. What I wonder is if anyone has tried to contact Microsoft
asking for permission to include low-resolution screenshots of their
copyright software and interface in Wikibooks or in Wikimedia
Foundatio projects? How would we even find that out? In particular,
could we (or someone else on our behalf) access the OTRS archives?
-Iamunknown
On 2/16/07, Andrew Whitworth <wknight8111(a)hotmail.com> wrote:
From: Iamunknown <iamunknown(a)gmail.com>
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?
it would have to be very very limited, and in that case it would likely
be a
few exceptions to the rule as opposed to a rule
in and of itself. And
regardless of what we choose to do with fair use media, if the WMF
mandates
a position one way or the other, we have to go
with that. I doubt highly
that the WMF is going to say "all fair use images must be deleted now",
it
is more likely that they will be phased out over
a period of time.
Even the fact that fair use images might be hard to replicate doesn't
change
the fact that the use of these images is still
illegal in most
countries.
Books like the European history book are illegal
to print and distribute
in
much of europe, for instance. I can think of
maybe a dozen instances
where
fair use images might be indispensible, and in
those cases we would have
to
create workarounds so the books could be printed
without them anyway.
I think the best course of action for us is to disallow new fair use
images
from being uploaded, and evaluate the old fair
use images, on a
case-by-case
basis. Most can likely be deleted (as mistagged
and a copyright
violation)
many more will likely be duplicatable, and the
remainder we can deal
with
later.
--Andrew Whitworth
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