On 7/13/06, jkelly@fas.harvard.edu jkelly@fas.harvard.edu wrote:
User:Kotepho queried the en: database as of July 4, 2006 to get numbers on media we are hosting. The results are at [[User:Kotepho/reports/Images by copyright status statistics]].
In short, we had the following:
853 215 tagged as having a free license 374 304 tagged with a variant of "fair use"
As a point of comparison, Commons has
677 813 media files as of this email's timestamp
Roughly half of our "fair use" images are tagged with the template for "magazine cover" or "promophoto".
"Promophoto" is a very ambiguous and often incorrectly applied template. I have never been happy with it -- most people seem to think that any image which appears unattributed multiple places on the internet counts as promotional photograph.
"Magazine cover" and other media covers on the other hand are pretty straightforward, and are probably legally pretty safe as well (they are transformative, they do not infringe directly upon the market of the image creator, their source is obvious).
So in the case of "promophoto", I'd say having so many of them is probably a bad sign. With "magazine cover", it's not so bad, from a "safe legal Wikipedia" standpoint. (The "we'd like to have more free content" standpoint is another question alltogether.)
FF