Justin Cormack wrote:
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.
If it's a matter of principle, then there are no "real uses" that are acceptable, no exceptions possible.
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.
"Prints on the walk of fame"? Exactly how does that clue people in about Darth Vader's menacing appearance, or how Yoda and Obi-wan are made-up to imitate the Campbellian archetype? If pictures are just decorative, then why not just eliminate all of them? (And yes, I know there are those on the far end of the sigma curve who think that's a great idea.)
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.
If it's a matter of principle, then no fair-use quotes are acceptable, ever. If it's a 99.99% issue, then you're saying you accept the basic principle that fair use is allowable in an otherwise-free encyclopedia, and we're just talking about doing a better job of enforcing policy. Which is it?
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.
The real irony here is that while we're apparently getting daily complaints about the *text* of people's bios, we don't ever seem to get any complaints about the *images* in them. When WPians have sent email asking about images, the response is always "sure, use it all you like". So in the big project of tightening up fair use, I put basic sorting, policy clarification, and response time at the top, then clearing out photos copyrighted by photographers and news organizations, and only then am I going to worry about clarifying the status of celebrity headshots. Like every other big WP project, it doesn't work to declare failure because not everything can be fixed in one day.
Stan