[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(a)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(a)dunelm.org.uk