On 11/15/06, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
It's not hard (finally) to find examples where our policy has increased the pool of free content. I don't think you're disputing that from that perspective our policy wins.
I think the net reuslt of culling all images of people who are living would be a decrease in overall article quality and the isolated creation of a minimal number of replacements. I'm all for encouraging people to replace images -- especially those which can be fairly easily replaced with free ones -- but I think having ridiculous requirements for what "reasonable" means doesn't help anybody. There is, somewhere, a point where draconian policies arranged towards a good end just end up wasting time which could also be spent towards that good end (that is, the inefficiency and frustration of the system impedes its functioning).
== The legal ==
None of your legal examples have any relevance to the question of whether or not we should ban all images of living people. They are generally good things to keep in mind but they don't result in making a draconian policy being sensible. There is no legal difference between a unlicensed photo of a dead person and the unlicensed photo of a living person -- the differences which might arise have nothing to do with the photos replaceability or not.
== The ethical == No matter what your position is on the ethics of copyright in general, I suspect that if you think carefully you will agree that acting against the wishes of the producers of content is not the right thing to do.
Again, you are making general statements that do not justify this approach to policy at all.
In both cases you are making general arguments against using "fair use" media at all, which has nothign to do with this policy. This is exactly the sort of "drift" of conversation that I was referring to before.
One cannot reasonably discuss whether or not we should use "fair use" at all and how to specifically implement "fair use" criteria at the same time. They are different discussions, and using one to try and slip in a new policy about the other is both complicating and misleading.
In the end, in any case, if this were, in reality, what FUC#1 was trying to do, then that should be discussed and ARTICULATED. As it is, this interpretation of FUC#1 is simply added on as a throwaway line, was not discussed in any detail, and is now being used to delete all sorts of things as if it were gospel. That's a bad policy model, in my opinion, but not too many people around here seem to care about what it might mean to have a good policy model, in my opinion.
and why now? when we're making such tremendous progress at getting Free pictures of famous people?
We should keep getting them and reward those who get them heavily through our other mechanisms. We should not use the desire of free images as an excuse to destroy all images which are non-free, unless we are deciding to get rid of "fair use" alltogether. Which would be a fine discussion to have but is not the one I am trying to have at the moment.
I am of course fine with keeping our "ultimate intentions" in mind when making policy. But when it comes to the protocols for implementation, we need to keep in mind that Wikipedia runs on more than just ideals -- it runs on users, and users are going to want policy that makes sense, and they are going to want policy that does not appear arbitrary. If we lose sight of that then Wikipedia will only be a place for the sorts of people who like to endlessly haggle over the internet and don't mind rules that don't make sense. I think that is a stupid restriction to have.
FF