On 1/13/06, Sam Korn smoddy@gmail.com wrote:
On 1/13/06, Anthony DiPierro wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
On 1/12/06, Sam Korn smoddy@gmail.com wrote:
It's quite simple really. Wikipedia's biggest reason for qualifying for fair use is that it is a free educational resource.
Everyone "qualifies" for fair use. The fact that Wikipedia is an educational resource is *one factor* in whether or not its use of certain images in certain ways is fair use.
My phrasing was wrong, forgive me. I meant to say that Wikipedia's biggest asset in asserting that its use of copyright media is fair use is that it is a free educational resource.
Being an educational resource is a factor, but it's only one. And being a free resource seems to me to provide as much of an argument against fair use as for it, as it means the distribution is much more widespread. Being nonprofit counts for something though, although userpages are pretty much always nonprofit as well as articles.
I think there's also some confusion over who is asserting fair use. It isn't really "Wikipedia", but rather the person who is using the content.
Userpages are just not educational.
In general most userpages have a lessened educational purpose than articles. I wouldn't go any further than that. I certainly wouldn't say "userpages are just not educational".
Um, I have never seen an educational userpage. Have you an example?
They're pretty much all educational to some extent. Just picking one randomly: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:BrainyBroad. That's educational.
Also, if I'm not mistaken, the rule applies to the entire namespace, including subpages. Subpages are quite often educational in purpose, in fact many subpages either used to be or will be an article (actually more than one *userpage* wound up being turned into an article as well).
User pages would, if I read the situation right, be very little different from a GeoCities website or the equivilent.
You definitely read it wrong. Wikipedia userpages are, in general, very different from the average geocities website.
How?
I explained in another post, but the biggest difference is that Geocities is a personal homepage provider, and Wikipedia:ISNOT. The whole purpose of the user pages is to facilitate the production of an encyclopedia - that's very different from the purpose of Geocities pages.
Image use would not qualify as fair use there; why should it here?
Image use can and often does qualify as fair use there.
On someone's personal website about themselves? Either you Merkins have *seriously* liberal copyright laws or we're talking at cross-purposes.
Fair use is fairly liberal. The fact that the image is being distributed on a personal website isn't really a factor. What matters is how the image is being used.
The only reason I can see not to use fair use images on user pages is that it is never necessary. So rather than waste time arguing case by case with each other you just ban it completely.
At least we agree on something!
Well, there's a flipside to that argument, though, and it goes back to my previous statement that "what matters is how the image is being used". The fact that one namespace is considered out based on horribly flawed legal reasoning only serves to confuse people into thinking that another namespace (the article namespace) is OK.
The fact is that what namespace is being used is irrelevant, and even just the fact that Wikipedia is an educational website is only *one factor*.
Anyway, I think what's important is that things are explained right. All the other Wikipedias are doing fine without fair use, surely the English Wikipedia could do so as well.