A just to reply to two things I didn't really get to in the last one...
On 9/24/05, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
There is also a pecular trend in some of these discussions: We often end up discussing it in terms of the copyright on images. This is certainly important, but the fundamentals of copyright law reside in the copyright of texts. With a solid understanding of how copyright and fair use apply to texts it is much easier to migrate that understanding to images and other modern media.
I think it is a bit incorrect to give texts a privileged place in this -- images of all sorts, as well as texts, have been components of copyright law since their very origins, and the chief reason images occupy so much attention on our project is that copyright law affects different media differently. It is very easy to take any textual information and, for the purposes of the encyclopedia, make it entirely safe and sanitary. The use of attributed brief quotations and summaries is a well-established part of academic critique and "fair use" even before there was a "fair use" clause. Graphical media though is more difficult to transform -- a redrawing of a famous painting would still be considered derivative in the eyes of the law (though to the varying extents depending on the specifics). Photographs, especially of historical events (which by their definition cannot be repeated), cannot be easily "freed" unless their copyrights expire (which for things post-1922 has not happened for a long time and will not likely happen for a long time) or they are specifically re-licensed or put into the public domain (and more likely the rights are just sold to Corbis for a nominal fee, who then puts ridiculous commercial restrictions on their licensing).
For Wikipedia, text is not a big deal. (For Wikiquote and Wikisource, it is the only deal, of course, as I said before). Images, however, are a big deal, and on Wikipedia they are, in my opinion, more of a big deal than they are on Commons (which under more ideal management would have a strict and simple shoot-on-sight policy to maintain copyright-purity), because it allows "fair use" images in the first place. (It is a big deal with Wikinews too, of course, but I think their shoot-on-sight policy looks pretty good, in theory.)
So anyway. All I'm trying to stress is that copyright *does* affect certain media differently than others, as does "fair use" (you can use a few seconds of a sound clip, but using a few pixels of an image doesn't seem to be quite the same thing, and text you can paraphrase completely and cite). Sorry to be so pedantic and tedious about it.
FF