An intrepid (anonymous) reader of this e-mailed me to say that tehre was such a template, {{fairusein}}.
I think perhaps though that this should be required for ANY fair use tag -- every use must be judged fair on different grounds.
Example:
[[Image:Carrie_Buck.jpg]] is used in two articles: [[Carrie Buck]] and [[Buck v. Bell]]. I think it is fair use in both contexts, though they have separate purpose (in one it illustrates the main subject of a biographical article, in another it is illustrating a plaintiff in a court case. Such dual-fair use should be made explicit; it would not be necessarily fair use on any other page. Under my proposal, it would contain two separate fair use notices, one for each page it was used on.
At the moment I'm seriously thinking of endeavoring on an larger project of fair use reform -- really getting serious about explicit fair use tagging and reviewing and things like that, making things a bit easier to understand for the many users who want to upload content but don't really want to take the time to learn U.S. intellectual property law (the basics of which are much simpler than they have a reputation for being, but as such is still not very interesting to most) . Anybody interested? Good idea, bad idea, waste of time?
FF
On 7/11/05, Fastfission fastfission@gmail.com wrote:
I think these are good comments. One way around this might be to make fair use tags require article names, i.e., {{fairuse|Article}}, which would then start off by saying, "This page is copyrighted etc. but thought to be fair use on the article {{article}}..."
FF
On 7/10/05, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
On 10/07/05, Fastfission fastfission@gmail.com wrote:
Postscript:
I also think it would be a good idea to create a template along the lines of {{fairuse-reviewed}} which would contain the normal fair use notice, as well as something like "The fair use criteria of this item has been reviewed and found satisfactory by at least one other user." or something like that. The process of reviewing fair use images would then be one of converting {{fairuse}} tags to {{fairuse-reviewed}} (after they had been reviewed). Perhaps a Wikiproject of some form would be good for this? Anyway, it would allow us to keep track of things. Just a thought.
I like this idea; might need a lot of manpower, though, and people do tend to have rather wide-ranging differences in how stringently they accept copyright restrictions. (I've more than once heard "well, it *should* be free" used to defend copyvios, and in one delightful case encountered someone who thought "in the public domain" meant *both* "this information is not secret" and "this information is free to copy"...). But I'd certainly be interested in seeing it work.
One fair-use problem, that I've been mulling over of late (I've been incommunicado for a few days), is that of context.
With something like a publicity photo of $celebrity, "fair use" is fairly incontrovertible. But... let's say we're dealing with the Lindisfarne Gospels, and the much-discussed photo thereof; assume it's tagged as fair use.
Even if would be fair use to use this to illustrate an article on the [[Lindisfarne Gospels]] (rare item, not much photographed, &c.) despite it being copyrighted... would it be fair use to use it to illustrate an article on, say, [[Rare-book photography]]? Sure, it's an example of such an image, but there's certainly thousands more of equal usability. How about using it to illustrate an article on [[Books]], or the [[Bible]]? Again, some relevance, but other images are just as good or better.
As I understand fair use - I don't claim to, one set of copyright law is confusing enough - it is quite dependent on the claim being a reasonable one in context.
But we'd have the one image, tagged as {{fairuse}} without that context; anyone wondering about using it in another article would simply see that we had it, it was under a legitimate-use license of some form, and slap it in their article, unless they were the introspective type given to considering license details.
This may, potentially, be a problem with the way we tag things - fair use inherently seems to imply "in the context of the article for which it was originally used". It may be fair use the second time (and probably is), but may not... I don't know what, if anything, to do about this, but thought I'd kick it out.
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- Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk