[My apologies to Tom; I initially sent this as a private email rather than to the list, so he gets two copies. Damn gmail and its reply function.]
On 01/11/05, Tom Cadden thomcadden@yahoo.ie wrote:
Firstly, I am aware of that. However the user in question never bothered to inform people, causing a lot of anger.
Interestingly, I just realised that I read the discussions immediately preceding the decision to go and get rid of these; someone ran a very interesting database query to find the most overused Fair Use images. Rather helpful, and certainly interesting; [[Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Fair use]] down at the bottom. (The bulk of of the most egregious cases have been dealt with.)
In many ways, clearing fair use material from templates is routine maintenance; policy says those images should not be there, so the images are removed from there. No permanent harm is done - the images are not deleted, so the matter can be disputed and rectified if there's an error. It's not particularly negotiable, your legal advice aside - we don't do things against policy simply because we're allowed to by the law.
Secondly, legal advice I have says that it wrong. A template image unrelated to an article is definitely illegal. However a template in effect bridging articles operates under a different legal framework and a relevant image in a template in an article space, where it does nothing more than visually facilitate a link and carries no claim of ownership or implicit meaning other than that facilitatory link, is covered by fair use according to a senior lawyer I know.
I am delighted to read that the lurkers support you in email.
However, if you think we should act contrary to policy, _changing the policy_ rather than asserting it's overly zealous may be the better way of going about it.
Alternately, perhaps looking on Commons for an almost-as-good free image may be advisable? We do seem to have quite the collection of pretty pictures of crowns there, one of which may be suitable. I notice that one of the templates named as disputed on AN/I has had this done...
-- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk