On 20 Jan 2006, at 22:41, Stan Shebs wrote:
Justin Cormack wrote:
What does a book cover add to an article on War and Peace?
If nothing else, it makes it clear that the article is about the book, not the movie, or the board game, or the ...
Image worth one word. Even that might not be clear.
Now, what does the Abbey Road album cover add to its article? Quite a bit it turns out - the article even has a section entitled "The famous photograph".
Yes, but these few real uses are swamped by the rubbish ones.
Most uses are just decoration, and they are stopping free images being used to replace them. You can be quite lateral with illustration.
Where are you expecting to get free images with which to illustrate Star Wars? They don't exist. Photos of Yoda dolls are not only pathetic, but they are not enencumbered copyright-wise either - the movie maker retains rights to the characters, and gives out licenses to reproduce them in other media. WP does not have such a license.
We dont have to illustrate everything. You can take photos of the stars at film openings, or prints on the walk of fame, there are lots of free photos out there.
Anyway, even if you eliminate "most uses" because they are just decoration, you haven't got rid of all of them. And if the use of copyrighted material compromises WP's goal of being a free encyclopedia, that principle applies to copyrighted textual quotes as well. So unless you're prepared to delete fair-use quotes, you still haven't got a "free encyclopedia". In fact, the quotes are a more serious problem for the freeness goal, because while the images are tagged and filterable, the quotes are not easily removable.
99.99% of the images labelled as fair use are not. 99.99% of the fair use text is. A few errors either way are not important to the goal of making a free encyclopaedia. The lies and blatent copyright violation in the images is.
I too can find a handful of fair use images. But I have yet to see something in say [[Category:Promotional images]] that is actually a promotional image (and there is really no justification for us having real promos anyway as we dont accept permission images). Its a blanket copyvio category. There are thousands of them, and more added every day.
Justinc