On 11/15/06, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
Do you wish to rethink your position or do you have counter evidence?
:)
Thanks Geni, although I'm not sure categories are the best way to demonstrate this... I believe (and hope) that in every category of 'fair use images' there are some images which are being used correctly. That is, the image is an excerpt of a copyrighted work which is being used in an article which is providing critical commentary of that work, and the excerpt is a necessary part of our ability to educate on the subject.
It's my experience that there are even quite a fair use images which are used in one place where there is a solid argument, as well as a number of additional places where there is virtually no claim for fair use.
Some categories are worse than others... Historically I found the magazine covers to be pretty bad... often our use of the cover images has been not to discuss the magazine but instead to compete with the magazine more successfully by using their images for our coverage of a common subject.
As an aside I find myself in an interesting position these days. I've been more active in the commons community where I find myself *defending* the concept of fair use images in Wikipedia, and then I walk into En and find myself lamenting enwiki's current fair use image status. :)
An interesting aspect of this is that the in Dewiki the articles which I argue need to have fair use images have prominent external links to someone elses copyvio.. while the enwiki articles which I argue use fair use images unnecessarily tend to have free illustrations and sometimes no illustration, but never external links in Dewiki.
This gives me confidence in the correctness of my position ... since although I strongly support Dewikis view of maximizing free content even at a substantial short term cost, I fail to see how we're maximizing free content by externally linking to unfree content. :)