On 21 Oct 2005, at 11:26, Alphax wrote:
No, thats not reasonable. Just because you cant find a picture doesnt make it copyright free. Hardly anything has a justification that we cannot ever find a free one. I have recently been tagging all cars as fairusereplace as there are so few that there is no specimen surviving.
What about prototypes that were never put into production, but there are photos on the corporate website?
There are a few of these.
Using such a photo on a more generic page, such as [[lawn mower]], is not a good fair use. Such is a large proportion of the bogus fair use claims we get.
I have found 2 pictures (in the wole of wikipedia) that I think are fair use, there are easy replacements for everything else.
Including comics, TV shows, motion pictures, and computer and video games?
I think the position with respect to these is legally dubious. In all the fair use case law in cases where it is customary to license material from the copyright holder fair use has not been granted. Encyclopaedias and other books always license this sort of content (not sure what the fees are; they might be free in some or all cases; people pay IMDB to show some photos); if we choose not to license it but to just copy it without asking we are in a dubious position.
The other issue is that while a newspaper printing a thumbnail of an album next to a review would probably be fair use, that newspaper will be binned the next day, and using it to collect thumbnails of album covers would be stupidly difficult. Wikipedia will soon have thumbnails of every album cover ever released, in a nice searchable database. When Amazon first started doing this they were forced by the record companies to stop bots trawling over their sites to fill in the pictures on peoples iTunes collections. Having a comprehensive collection suddenly is no longer fair use, even if one individual case might be. Especially as illustrating an album is not essential for critical commentary on the music, its just an identification use, and we dont link to somewhere where you can buy it (the fair use search engine illustration thumbnails case was linking to sites you could buy the item in question).
Justinc