On 25/09/2007, Steve Summit <scs(a)eskimo.com> wrote:
geni wrote:
On 24/09/2007, Omegatron
<omegatron+wikienl(a)gmail.com> wrote:
The criteria for inclusion of media files in
articles should be based
not on prohibiting certain "non-free" licenses, but on *preferring*
certain licenses over others.
That is already the case as far is allowed within US law.
Based on one reading of our various policies and guidelines, maybe.
But in practice, certainly not.
It is widely acknowledged that our policy on fair use is
considerably stricter than required by U.S. law.
That may not actually be true though. Album cover use in particular
may be an issue. However CDCovers.cc didn't take the issue to court so
I don't think there is any case law.
And we have
several editors whose self-proclaimed goal is to eradicate every
last fair-use image, no matter what. There seem to be two
underlying motives.
And we have a rather larger number who disagree with them. Assuming no
significant developments in case law I doubt we will see any further
changes in our day to day fair use situation.
One is that we have to be nice to the downstream
feeds; we have
to make it maximally easy for them to use our content under their
own perhaps even-stricter policies. Why it's our job to help
them do this is never adequately explained. It's also never
explained why we have to keep doing this in spite of our
comprehensively fine-grained image licensing tags, which ought to
allow any given downstream to filter out anything and everything
they don't like. But that motive *does* keep getting mentioned,
despite the existence of the tags. But it probably doesn't even
matter in the end, given the existence of the second motive.
The more use able an encyclopedia is the better it is.
I'll be roundly condemned for saying this, but I
believe that the
second and stronger motive for being so rampantly anti-fair-use,
for deleting all fair-use images now (instead of leaving them
around until truly-free alternatives can be found), is that it
helps push a POV agenda that the world's copyright laws and
attitudes about copyright are wrong and need to be changed.
Nope. Most of the world doesn't have fair use. If you wanted a better
conspiracy theory you might wish to consider the match between fair
dealing and our fair use polices.
On a local level we have found we are more likely to get free media
where non free media is forbidden.
That isn't to say we don't have a copyright agenda we do. We need to
make sure that free licenses remain legal and that the public domain
is not reduced any further in the US.
Wikipedia is now influential enough, and its GFDL
ideals are
already consonant enough with those which the anti-copyright
brigade wants to pursue, that it's an extremely attractive venue
for this agenda.
We accept copyright as is. The GFDL doesn't really work otherwise.
In fact, it's not too much of an exaggeration
to say that the anti-copyright brigade has effectively hijacked
Wikipedia for this purpose.
No we are not anti-copyright. By not accepting widespread fair use we
say to traditional copyright holders "okey here's your ball we are
going to play our game". We accept traditional copyright and in effect
sidestep it.
--
geni