On 6 Dec 2005, at 03:12, Fastfission wrote:
On 12/4/05, Puddl Duk puddlduk@gmail.com wrote:
I think we have almost 600 fair use images in the pokeman category
That's true, and may or may not be a problem. The sheer number isn't necessarily the problem, though -- images which are individually "fair use" are still "fair use" whether there are two of them or 600 of them. There is a case on this relating to Beanie Babies, I believe: Ty, Inc., vs. Publications International, Ltd. (discussed at http://www.ivanhoffman.com/beanie.html)
Not having 600 can be more significant than having one: it is the use as a whole which will be taken into account; the extent of the copying includes collections in many cases. The Beanie Babe case is not necessarily applicable (although it might be) as it relied on 2D photos not being substitutes for 3D dolls; we normally rely on being able to take pictures of 3D objects anyway without infringement. The problem with the Pokemon is that the actual images are also straight copies (not artistic photos off a screen say), and to some extent images on a screen of pokemon do substitute for the originals, certainly more than Beanie babes do. There is also the trademark infringement issue (which was not used in Beanie Babes, but I would not be surprised if Pokemon fell into this. But its unclear.
How the Twin Peaks and Seinfeld rulings apply to Wikipedia and Wikiquote is unclear to me. Personally I'd be very, very suspicious of having detailed pages about copyrighted material which is purely descriptive (and not analysis, parody, etc.) or, at worse, relies upon heavy use of copyrighted content (images, quotes), even if we are non-profit. But I'm no lawyer, and this seems to be ground which is not very clearly spelled out legally.
I hope we are unlikely to get to the stage of Twin Peaks, ie almost copying in scripts.
This is nice and cheerful: http://www.ivanhoffman.com/screen.html