Fastfission wrote:
On 11/28/05, Anthere Anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
Given that images used on used pages are unlikely to end up in a DVD or a book, I seriously doubt who would suffer copyright infringement attacks for images hosted on community pages.
It strikes me as odd, that we authorize fair use on encyclopedic content (which is likely to be reused and to irritate copyright holders), while forbidding it on personal pages (where it is unlikely to be much troubles).
Overall, our license issues strike me as being more confusing and messy every day that goes by.
It strikes me that you don't really know what fair use is. It might aid you if you read our page on the fair use policy at [[WP:FU]] first, because you seem confused on a few legal points which are not terribly difficult but most people haven't been exposed to them.
The reason people have been cracking down on fair use tagging is because if something is tagged as such but is not actually "fair use", then it is a copyright violation and puts us in a legally bad position. People have been generously mopping up some of the simple cases (i.e. where images are claimed as "fair use" but are not used in an encyclopedia article) with the sole intention of helping Wikipedia keep a "clean" legal status. The goal is to avoid getting sued and having Wikipedia donations spent on lawyers rather than new servers.
I don't want to sound unsympathetic, but I'm having a hard time understanding why you absolutely needed to have an image whose copyright was owned by someone else and not released freely kept on the Wikipedia servers even though it wasn't being used.
FF
Simple. At the same time, we were working with a lawyer (participant) to wikipedia, Alex, on the french wikipedia, setting up a policy to clarify fair use on our project.
When we set up the policy, we worked on a collection of "explanations" the editors had to provide for the images to be acceptable under the fair use doctrine. Amonst those "explanations" were the possibility to reuse some images in poor quality, while the high quality images were under copyright. For example, an image of a movie advertisement, or a cd print (the jacket ? is that the word ?), could be used, while uploading a full high quality movie picture could not.
Most of the images I uploaded on Wikipedia are mine and are under the gfdl, even those of my children, which is probably a serious mistake (and I presume I will soon delete them, because I think they could be used in inappropriate ways). Amongst the few not under gfdl, those from Algerian desert were taken by my husband. When I uploaded them, there were no tags. So, I did not even asked him really. But I knew there were a couple he might have desired to use later in his own reports (ie, in a professional book or leaflets, where the printer usually retain copyright... poor life of researchers :)). For this reason, I uploaded them in low quality, rather than printing quality. It was also a time when they were no images on these topics at all.
In december 2004, when a hord of fanatic started deleted all my images, upon the reason I never taggued them (of course, they were no tags when I uploaded them), I hurried tagging them. And fell on these few from my husband. He was away on a expedition far away at that time, and I thought "do I have the right to put a GFDL tag on them, whilst he does not even know what it means, but while I know he approves the reduced quality use... but might put the high quality in a book later on ?). I asked a couple of people, who said "fair use". And since it was accepted at that time, fair use it was. it was not a problem a year ago. he does not care for the copyright of the low quality at all.
When we went to Algeria again together, we both together took more than 800 images. Most are mostly professional and would not interest wikipedia I think. Mostly plants (for me) and rocks (for him). I uploaded a few of these pictures on commons. I put all of them under GFDL. Some of them were uploaded in low quality on purpose. But being better informed then, we put them under a free licence. And kept the high quality for us.
Does that clarify ?
Ant