On 9/25/07, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 25/09/2007, Steve Summit scs@eskimo.com wrote:
geni wrote:
On 24/09/2007, Omegatron omegatron+wikienl@gmail.com wrote:
The criteria for inclusion of media files in articles should be based not on prohibiting certain "non-free" licenses, but on *preferring* certain licenses over others.
That is already the case as far is allowed within US law.
Based on one reading of our various policies and guidelines, maybe. But in practice, certainly not.
It is widely acknowledged that our policy on fair use is considerably stricter than required by U.S. law.
That may not actually be true though. Album cover use in particular may be an issue. However CDCovers.cc didn't take the issue to court so I don't think there is any case law.
In what way are they an issue?
Have we had any complaints?
Honestly interested..
And we have several editors whose self-proclaimed goal is to eradicate every last fair-use image, no matter what. There seem to be two underlying motives.
And we have a rather larger number who disagree with them. Assuming no significant developments in case law I doubt we will see any further changes in our day to day fair use situation.
However, the recent practise is to replace AGF with bots because they cant assume, judging good in black and white, and dont have time for the messy business of intentions. The balance has shifted without consensus due to the efficiency of the bots, and the backlogs they cause. Admins clearing those backlogs on Wikipedia rarely spare the time for the easy cases such as logos, PD images that can be detected with the human eye and brain and user contributed images that are almost certainly intended to be donated to Wikipedia under any license, except that the new user has no idea how to do that. Whenever I work on clearing one of these categories (orfud, nld, etc), within an hour I start running into boilerplate deletions by another admin. When this happens, the entire category will usually be deleted within 5-10 minutes. I am not annoyed so much at the bots, or the admins that are acting as automations, as I can see it is an out of control problem that we have yet to adjust to, but this trendy new approach is wasting time and disk space, and we are biting new contributors with every template.
One is that we have to be nice to the downstream feeds; we have to make it maximally easy for them to use our content under their own perhaps even-stricter policies. Why it's our job to help them do this is never adequately explained. It's also never explained why we have to keep doing this in spite of our comprehensively fine-grained image licensing tags, which ought to allow any given downstream to filter out anything and everything they don't like. But that motive *does* keep getting mentioned, despite the existence of the tags. But it probably doesn't even matter in the end, given the existence of the second motive.
The more use able an encyclopedia is the better it is.
In context of the email you responded to, this is an argument for gracefully degrading when images cant be used. We can, and should, have the 1000 words as well as the image. Free images are of no use to the blind.
I'll be roundly condemned for saying this, but I believe that the second and stronger motive for being so rampantly anti-fair-use, for deleting all fair-use images now (instead of leaving them around until truly-free alternatives can be found), is that it helps push a POV agenda that the world's copyright laws and attitudes about copyright are wrong and need to be changed.
Nope. Most of the world doesn't have fair use. If you wanted a better conspiracy theory you might wish to consider the match between fair dealing and our fair use polices.
Does this mean then that you want the English Wikipedia to have our non-free media limited to the intersection of all non-free laws across the globe? Has an analysis been done on what provisions for non-free will be left if that was adopted ? I expect that this would exclude all satire, and probably many other types of reuse allow for by common law. A more workable approach would be to limit non-free to the provisions in the country of origin where also permissible in the host country USA. A lot of our fair-use media originates from the USA, so this would mean that fair-_use_ is still acceptable in those cases.
Again, I think that dragons be there, and we are on safer ground by finding ways to include most image where USA fair-use applies, and ensure that the encyclopedia gracefully degrades where an image may not be used. This would of course be coupled with measures to tag images that are replaceable and try to find replacements as soon as possible.
On a local level we have found we are more likely to get free media where non free media is forbidden.
{{fact}}
Forbidding non-free media has a cost of churning through non-free images, and even the effort to acquire free media where non-free would be sufficient, in the short term, is time that could have been spent creating free media where there is no non-free equivalent, or uploading historically valuable works to Wikisource, or writing more free content on Wiktionary, Wikipedia and Wikibooks. As you know, putting works on Wikisource also usually involves adding free media to the commons, and expanding Wikipedia increases the visibility of Wikimedia, in turn promoting the addition of free media by new contributors. We need to be careful not to put free media ahead of the other free content.
That isn't to say we don't have a copyright agenda we do. We need to make sure that free licenses remain legal and that the public domain is not reduced any further in the US.
Wikipedia is now influential enough, and its GFDL ideals are already consonant enough with those which the anti-copyright brigade wants to pursue, that it's an extremely attractive venue for this agenda.
We accept copyright as is. The GFDL doesn't really work otherwise.
Right, nobody who is well informed in this debate is against copyright; we all know that it underpins our daily contributions. Most of us have been around long enough to intimately understand the basis, motivations and long term effects of different copyleft strategies. The debate here is similar to the nature of the "open source" vs "free software" debate, only in this case it is "fair use/dealing is a human right" vs "free content". We are all on the same side, but have differences on the priorities and how we should act in the short term in order to promote the same long term goals.
For my part, it is the current practices for removing fair-use that concern me, as I am happy with the policy of limiting replaceable fair-use. I think upload limitations may even be necessary to keep fair-use manageable, perhaps using the upcoming flagged revisions improvements to build better heuristics into MediaWiki to determine when a user should be prevented from uploading more images.
Another solution is to put more eyes onto the problem sooner by enhancing the upload function so that, on enwiki, it is an action associated with articles. All new images could initially be placed onto a gallery tab of the associated article, and these uploads would then appear on the Watchlist of people who potentially care about the image. This would hopefully ensure that images are quickly investigated, cleaned up, properly tagged and put to good use, or pushed into the deletion queue because the image itself isnt desirable. A natural extension of this would be to limit the image to that one article until it can be verified as free content, or a fair-use rationale's for another article has been assessed & approved.
-- John