On 19 May 2006, at 21:41, maru dubshinki wrote:
Unless you are speaking in the ridicoulously long-term sense in which
everything (hopefully) passes into the public domain, fair use is
inevitably part of our mission. There are entire sectors of articles
where fair use is necessary, as the copyright holders will definitely
not release the images under a decent license, and where recreation
under a different license is not acceptable. From my own experience:
the Star Wars article. We only accept canon depictions- and because
canonicity policies say that only material authorized and licensed by
the copyright holders is canon, and because the copyright holders will
only do proprietary releases, we cannot, by definition, have free
images relating to Star Wars. Indeed, the absolute best we could do is
perhaps have some free images of fans, (though trademark and copyright
issues are still problematic. If we have a picture of a bunch of fans
dressed up in pitch-perfect Stormtrooper , tusken raider, Royal Guards
etc. costumes, can that really be GFDL'ed or PD'ed?), or maybe of
productions.
We do not need pictures in these articles.
We can link to external ones.
If you dont want to make a *free* encyclopaedia you can join another
project.
I wouldnt mind a fork of wikipedia that has "fair use" and other copyvio
images on top of the wikipedia text. Someone else can deal with the
legal
issues and the fact that distribution is a problem. Being free is a
vital
part of out mission. Reuse is vital. It is the reason many of us
participate.
I really do not care if we dont have pictures if we fulfil this mission.
I know other people just want to make the best encyclopedia and thats
fine.
Its just not our project. Our project can support that one because it is
free. But these huge swathes of non free, non redistributable images are
a huge threat to the project.
Justinc