On 7/4/05, Haukur Þorgeirsson haukurth@hi.is wrote:
The goal of the project is not to produce an encyclopedia with content that is free for some people for some uses.
But that's exactly what's happening as long as all the focus is on U.S. laws. Fair use won't protect you if you're publishing Wikipedia derived content in Denmark. Nor will Bridgeman v. Corel.
Recently a picture of the Lindisfarne Gospels taken from the British Library website became a featured picture even though the BL explicitly claims copyright on it and that claim may well hold up in a British court.
Well I can't speak for others. In general I believe we should never feature a picture not produced by a Wikipedian. The behind featuring works is to show the best we have to offer, not the best we've found someplace else and are redistributing. :)
Well, the policy of Wikipedia disagrees with you, and has for a fairly long time.
I know. And I will abide by it. But I will also argue that it should be changed.
I too would like to see some changes. For example putting the onus on those who claim fair use to demonstrate why there is no possible way a free image would work in the place of the fair use image.
Fair enough. I'm sure this is a stressful job and I applaud you for doing it.
I've only done a little, there are others who deserve the real credit. In any case, it is sometimes streesful work, but it is good work.
As I said, if the images are not tagged it is impossible short of having someone read all of the image texts and removing a lot of images that are free but left untagged.
Agreed. But if we properly tag everything the technical problem is a minor one.
Of course if we don't put the teeth of deletion behind incorrect tagging we won't get much of it tagged.
I don't want to exclude stupid mirrors or anyone else. If a neo-nazi wants to publish Wikipedia content modified to a nazi POV that's fine with me as long as she respects the GFDL.
Heil-Jimbo! er. nevermind.
But I hope you'll agree that we have a visibility problem here. We're losing the excellent Eastern Yellow Robin.jpg because its author won't release it for use outside of Wikipedia, due to concern about stupid commercial mirroring.
We'll lose out on some great images, but in the long term it is perhaps the uncooperative author who will lose out: We will eventually produce or obtain an equal or better under more free terms...
Just visit a site like dpreview and look at the pictures people post in the forums (esp the higher end camera forums)... Some of the bird photographs are stunning... and even if only one tenth of 1% of all photographers in the world would be willing to agree to release their work under the GFDL or CC-BY they will eventually fill our needs in all areas of replacable images.
We should by all means try to highlight the positive reuse that the GFDL allows.
Agreed there. I think the biggest freedom that free licenses provide is a freedom from worry. By permitting so many uses people do not need to worry that their use will be wrong. This means that people will have the freedom to use the content without worrying that clearing the copyright will be more trouble than it is worth.
With permission isn't a lame excuse, it's a good one.. but it's still not one we can always accept.
I'm arguing that in many cases it is no worse an excuse than the U.S.-specific legal niceties currently tolerated.
With this I agree, but I think we disagree on the solution. I think we should discourage fair use images as well where possible and that after the nosource and with permission images have been cleaned up we should start evaluating free use images and replacing them as well.
However, it is fundimentally impossible to well cover some subjects without using a copyrighted work: for example if the subject is a copyrighted painting it may be nessassary to take from that painting to discuss it. This is the use fair use was intended to protect, and this use is effectively protected in most nations if not by law then by common sense.
I don't think we can make the same argument that some with permission images are attached to subjects where there can be no free replacement. If there are indeed some cases I promise that it is far more rare than the correct use of fair use.