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Justin Cormack wrote:
On 20 Oct 2005, at 21:23, Matt Brown wrote:
<snip howto on taking photos of lawnmowers>
The problem is worst on such generic articles, as you say. If one's writing a specific article on a specific lawnmower, say the [[GrassMaster Lawn Master 2000]], then one needs a specific picture of that specific model. It might have been out of production for 20 years and examples are hard to find. In that case, I believe it's quite acceptable to go to the GrassMaster corporate website to see if they have a picture we could use under fair use, or scan an image out of a period GrassMaster catalog. We're using a company's own promotional image to illustrate (and thus, in a sense, promote) their own product - a fairly slam-dunk fair use case, and likely counting as use with permission as well (so zero chance we'll get sued). Of course, should some fellow Wikipedian be a lawnmower collector who has one, it's preferable if we get their free-licensed photos to replace it.
No, thats not reasonable. Just because you cant find a picture doesnt make it copyright free. Hardly anything has a justification that we cannot ever find a free one. I have recently been tagging all cars as fairusereplace as there are so few that there is no specimen surviving.
What about prototypes that were never put into production, but there are photos on the corporate website?
Using such a photo on a more generic page, such as [[lawn mower]], is not a good fair use. Such is a large proportion of the bogus fair use claims we get.
I have found 2 pictures (in the wole of wikipedia) that I think are fair use, there are easy replacements for everything else.
Including comics, TV shows, motion pictures, and computer and video games?
The other category is people who, wanting to illustrate the [[GrassMaster Lawn Master 2000]] article, will rummage through their well-thumbed stack of "Lawnmower Monthly" until they find one on the cover, scan that cover, and use the magazine cover to illustrate the article. After all, "aren't magazine covers always fair use"?
No they arent. The bogus fair use for specific categories should go. There is no fair use without justification.
You are quite right.
Such images where people could try and claim "fair use" in more than one article should probably be avoided. In that particular case, a more generic "Lawnmower Monthly" cover should be scanned and put into [[Lawnmower monthly]].
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