On 24/02/2008, WJhonson@aol.com WJhonson@aol.com wrote:
If, in a biography of Patti Smith, we have no free images of Patti Smith, but we have a book cover of her biography writen by John Brown or whatever, and that book cover, is in fact, a photograph of Patti Smith, we can and should use it in the article. That photograph enhances the project, harms no one, and is fair use. Rejecting it for bureaucratic reasons, making the *rule* more important than the participants, is not in the best interests of the project. I'm not suggesting we have a rule for not using book covers. I'm suggesting that those people who interpret our policy to state that, are harming the project.
How exactly would you defend that under the doctrine of fair use? I really can't see a way to do it.
Some editors place the rules as gods over the community, without realizing that it is the community which made the rules. Some editors place such a high reliance in their personal interpretations of general policy, to fit specific situations, that they cannot comprehend how harmful their actions are to the project, when they create such a level of internal discord, and when the end-result denigrates the project without creating any enhanced value.
Our copyright policy was for the most part put together by people who have at least a passing knowledge of copyright law. So fair you have failed to show that you do.
The removal of all fair use photographs does nothing useful for the project.
The project is to make a free encyclopedia.
It does however harm it, by removing useful illustrations from articles that could use them,
So far for your chosen example this does not appear to be true.
replacing their removal with a vacancy filled by nothing. That isn't progress.
Will Johnson
Experience suggests that nothing is more likely to be replaced by a free image than an image with a really really weak fair use claim.