On 11/16/06, Matthew Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
I think you slightly misunderstood the point I was making, which is that vast proportions of the images on en: which are claimed as fair use are actually cases of making up fair use justifications for images
[snip]
Ah, well the categories the geni mentioned contain many tens of thousands of images most of which would not meet your criteria.
When you say 'vast', I'd generally take that to be something at least approaching a majority.. and I'm pretty confident that that would be incorrect.
[snip]
In most of these cases, Wikipedia is not in itself in any legal risk - the free-content goals of the project may be at more risk, of course.
I think that outside of some disagreement over how many images we're talking about, which I'm not sure how to settle since the tagging won't always tell us, I think we agree.
Can you come up with somethings I could scan for in the text of the description pages to identify fair use + unacceptable permission which won't horribly under-report?
Another point: not only is failing the Free Content goals of Wikipedia a risk that comes from accepting non-free works, but when we accept non-free works which don't have rock solid fair use claims we risk our neutrality: After all, if we're only getting away with a usage because we're in the owners good graces ... it creates a pressure (perhaps more often subtle than overt) to avoid saying things they dislike to avoid getting demands and legal threats over the images.
It swings both ways, "give us an image you like under a free license so we can stop using this ugly one" has gotten us some freely licensed images. :)