Greg, I agree with much of your analysis, but depart at a few points.
On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 5:17 PM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote:
<snip>
The only justification for
including any non-free works on english wikipedia is that doing so is
widely accepted to be a necessity (on EN, at least) to accomplish our
stated mission as an encyclopaedia, and it so happens that kind of
necessity has long been understood by the lawmakers and the courts, so
that it's clearly permitted.
Both of these aspects are necessary components of the reasoning, and
it's not at all clear that the signpost is itself essential, even less
so that signpost being hosted by Wikimedia is essential, and I think
it would be patently ridiculous to say that the signpost being able to
use particular images is essential for the project mission...
It's true that the Signpost itself, much less non-free images in the
Signpost, are not strictly essential to the mission of Wikipedia. But
then, neither are most non-free images that we do allow. Some images
are more essential than others; [[Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima]] is
quite a different matter from the typical article about a book or
album where the cover isn't explicitly discussed. And for that
matter, many articles themselves aren't strictly necessary, insomuch
as inclusion policy is under-determined by the project mission and in
some ways arbitrary. Essential-ness is relative.
I would argue that reviews of Wikipedia-related books are at least as
important to furthering the mission of the project as a lot of the
article space content that we categorically allow.
<snip>
Part of the notion behind being particular about
non-project usage is
that it fosters a culture of being particular about copyright— without
an acute awareness of the restrictions that copyright can place on
usage, we couldn't hope to minimize problems which would diminish the
usefulness of the project. The tighter rules outside of project space
give us an opportunity to hone our skills on alternatives and dispense
some nit-picking energy in a place where it doesn't harm the end
project. It also helps make it more clear that the state of the rest
of the project is a reasoned compromise between extremes. ("See, our
acceptance of non-free works doesn't mean we hate freedom. We have a
hard prohibition against it everwhere else!")
It seems to me that book reviews are one area where both legally and
culturally, fair use has been pretty well carved out such copyright
isn't much of a restriction on freedom. We're curtailing our own
freedom for the sake of painting a lot of different situations with
the same brush.
Nevertheless, I see that there's enough pushback from people who
recognize that an exception could be made in a case like this but
don't think it should be that I'll drop it.
-Sage