Some people are passionate about including "their" pics at all costs. I once got into a minor edit war with a newbie who insisted on replacing a clear public domain picture of an actress with a blurry screenshot from "Dallas".
I'm not sure what to do about such trolling and territoriality, but I think adding some sort of waiting period similar to page move restrictions or sprotection might solve a lot of the other problems from our newer users. A lot of the problem is that the rules aren't exactly clear - fair use isn't the most black and white area of law - and so people go by gut instinct instead of the rules. I still think a tutorial might not be a bad way to go. As has been pointed out, a lot of users would just ignore it, but it would help a lot of the good faith mistakes.
On 3/23/06, John Lee johnleemk@gawab.com wrote:
I agree here. I want to AGF, and perhaps in a number of cases, yes, the editor is just acting in good faith. But I've seen a number of cases -- even on Commons -- where the uploader just wanted some pictures for his article. Take, for instance, the images on [[Michelle Kwan]], which are all licenced under the GPL and yet are sourced from Encarta or some Tripod webpage -- neither of which mentions *anything* about the GPL. Numerous images previously used on the article as fair use were taken down (for what reasons, I know not) and replaced with these ostensibly "free" images. I suspect this is more common than we might think. I browse the celebrity articles quite often, and I keep seeing this game of musical chairs going on with the images because they're fair use. Each time the image gets replaced with either an image lacking source/licence data or another fair use image -- in either case, the image will end up deleted after a while, and the cycle will repeat. Is it any wonder that fans get fed up and start blatantly lying to us about the copyright status of images?