On 9/11/07, Daniel R. Tobias dan@tobias.name wrote:
On 11 Sep 2007 at 13:29:21 +0100, "David Gerard" dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
And I didn't note that "case by case" is actually required for justifying fair use. If the "abuse" is removing a nonfree image, I generally find myself almost entirely unable to manifest two hoots.
It can be kind of frustrating, though, to try to get what one feels is justified fair use images into the encyclopedia in the face of the strong ideological opposition from those who want a totally purist site in the area of copyright license. The purists won in many language Wikipedias, such as German, but couldn't get such an outright victory in English, so they took the next best step for them of continually tossing up hoops for image uploaders to jump through. Since I uploaded quite a few top-level-domain registry logos in the course of populating the infoboxes for TLDs (I created the TLD infobox and spent about two years gradually getting them in place in all the TLDs, including the 200-plus country code domains), and did most of this uploading in the more cavalier days when image licensing wasn't as vigorously policed as it is now, I'm faced now with a steady stream of ominous talk-page notices posted by bots threatening to remove this or that image unless I jump through whichever hoop they're tossing now, like providing a source or a rationale or a haiku.
I agree that's frustrating, and despite being a supporter of stronger emphasis on the free in "free encyclopaedia", it still annoys me to receive such notices. If you ask me, we have failed with these hoops we make people jump through.
We should be making people appreciate what it means to be free - that certain uses of copyrighted material are not compatible with our intention to build a free encyclopaedia; if they do not contribute to the free aspect, and minimally (if at all) to the encyclopaedia, they do not belong. Logos and other such identification material are important, as are certain noteworthy depictions of events, or depictions of noteworthy events.
But if the image used is not remarkable, and does not add any significant information to the article (does a generic still of footage of Islamic insurgents taken from a television network add anything to an article on Islamic insurgents? Re-enactments, or stills of noteworthy footage such as videos released by Islamic insurgent groups add to the encyclopedic value of the article, but not generic copyrighted images), it ought to be removed.
Of course, applying this principle is not easy if you do it mechanically because there are so many grey areas and borderline cases. You need to appreciate the spirit we are founded on - does it add anything to the encyclopaedia, while having minimal impact on the free aspect (minimal being relative to the encyclopedic value of the copyrighted content)? We wouldn't repost portions of a transcript from an episode of Lost just because we legally can, so why should we have a generic still for every Lost episode on lists of Lost episodes?
Even more depressing is that people are not appreciating why we need a fair use rationale. IANAL, but I'm fairly confident that in most cases, a fair use rationale does not add much legally and certainly not libre-ly to the value of copyrighted content. It's become just another hoop to jump through - people don't think about why we need rationales. They've become an end in themselves, rather than a means to an end.
Perhaps I'm setting my sights too high, but it ticks me off a little that we're losing sight of what it means to be a free encyclopaedia, with some people overemphasising the encyclopaedia and others overemphasising the free. We need both to be Wikipedia.
Johnleemk