On 7/25/07, Todd Allen toddmallen@gmail.com wrote:
Bryan Derksen wrote:
Steve Summit wrote:
Todd Allen wrote:
The point isn't -only- "Will someone sue Wikipedia over this?" or even "Will someone sue a commercial mirror over this if they inadvertently use it too?" It's "Unless we absolutely -must, must- have nonfree content, we should keep nonfree content off the -free- encyclopedia."
Bearing in mind that not everybody agrees with this last principle.
And also where the "must have" line gets drawn. A lot of people feel that articles about music albums must have a cover scan in order to be "complete", and IMO a valid case can be made for that.
Amazon is way more commercial than most of our mirrors and they seem to consider cover scans both important and safe to use.
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Oh I'd agree we're legally on very safe ground there. I can't imagine us getting sued over an album cover, nor can I imagine anyone winning in the unlikely event they were to try. It's certainly nothing like putting up mp3s of the songs on the CD.
However, our criteria are -deliberately- far more narrow than "Can we legally use this image?" They're fully intended to be so, else we would use permission for Wikipedia only, noncommercial use only, and publicity releases everywhere we could. The idea here is to build a free content encyclopedia, and every use of nonfree content harms that mission. We must look carefully in each individual case to determine whether that harm is in that case outweighed by the educational benefit the image provides. I don't think the answer is always "no, we should never use nonfree content under any circumstances" (as some do, and as de seems to do alright with), and I don't think the answer is always "yes, if we can legally get away with it", or always "yes, if it's an article about a..." (as some do). It's something that should be evaluated case by case, image by image, article by article, not with broad strokes.
No, that's silly. We can easily make a determination that broad classes of stuff are either just always ok, or never ok. Every time we're able to do so, we reduce what people will end up arguing over on-wiki. If we have a blanket "Company Logos are OK", then the next round of missing fair-use justification deletes can just skip logos, etc.
I also object to claiming that we have to only host truly free content in order to protect free content's sake.
We need to ensure that content we host is safely usable by Wikipedia. By safe, I mean "in compliance with generally accepted principles, commonly used by other media and references, as far as we can tell in compliance with the laws that are relevant, and unlikely to be controversial with copyright or trademark holders". (check, for logos, and for album covers)
We should ensure that our noncommercial (check) and commercial (check) mirrors can use the content safely.
We should ensure that foreign users can also redistribute it under normal usage abroad (check), barring particularly odious local copyright rules (and keep in mind, that FREE CONTENT isn't compatible with some of the local copyright rules..).
The reality is, that things like logos and album covers are to some degree "free content" already. They have a copyright owner, and trademark status in the case of logos, but they're there and used and intended to be used to identify the company or album etc. "They haven't released all rights under free licenses..." is generally true, but for these classes of items, they don't have to. The usage that we, or another reference source, could make of them is standard expected usage in the legal environment.