I have tried to make a difference in the handling of purportedly "fair use" materials on Wikipedia. I believe that we have a plague of copyvio images, many of them bearing bogus fair use claims.
One of the problems is that there is no project-wide policy on the requirements for using fair use images. The validity of a fair use claim is up to the uploader.
Though I am not an attorney, I am myself unconvinced that such things as misappropriated news photos and graphics on current events, when appearing prominently in articles linked from the main page, and edited by many people, would qualify for OCILLA safe harbor provisions. Though we have many dubious fair use claims, the ones involving recent news media images concern me the most because of the potential for bad press for us, and because of the potential case to be made for genuine monetary losses by news media that are in competition with the free information source we provide.
Some basic things like deleting newly uploadeded, unsourced images would be a start. So would a policy that states, specifically, that images taken from present-day news sources or wire services are against Wikipedia policy, regardless of the fair use case that the uploader thinks may apply.
I have been trying to form policy by working through issues on Wikipedia, but it is becoming clear that (a) the general opposition to deletion of anything, (b) the inability to undelete images, and (c) the lack of understanding of the nuances of U.S. copyright law are working together to prevent any useful work from being done by consensus. I believe that leadership, and careful involvement of counsel, will be necessary to adopt useful policy.
The Uninvited Co., Inc. (A Delaware corporation)
On Monday, September 12, 2005, at 11:54 AM, uninvited@nerstrand.net wrote:
I have tried to make a difference in the handling of purportedly "fair use" materials on Wikipedia. I believe that we have a plague of copyvio images, many of them bearing bogus fair use claims.
True... but as long as you have no approval process on images that are uploaded this will always be a problem.
One of the problems is that there is no project-wide policy on the requirements for using fair use images. The validity of a fair use claim is up to the uploader.
It's pretty good right now actually - you've got Carnildo and others making sure Featured Articles have good copyright stuff for their images.
Though I am not an attorney, I am myself unconvinced that such things as misappropriated news photos and graphics on current events, when appearing prominently in articles linked from the main page, and edited by many people, would qualify for OCILLA safe harbor provisions. Though we have many dubious fair use claims, the ones involving recent news media images concern me the most because of the potential for bad press for us, and because of the potential case to be made for genuine monetary losses by news media that are in competition with the free information source we provide.
It's a dicey issue. It depends on a lot of things. I recommend actually contacting a real lawyer if someone's really concerned.
Some basic things like deleting newly uploadeded, unsourced images would be a start.
What happens if one of those images are valuable?? Doing this without some kind of "undelete" mechanism could be really bad.
So would a policy that states, specifically, that images taken from present-day news sources or wire services are against Wikipedia policy, regardless of the fair use case that the uploader thinks may apply.
How do you define "present day"? The only case for that and say, 10 years ago, is that doing it now might cause more bad press... but if you're going to do this you may as well just prohibit it altogether.
Thanks, RN
On 9/12/05, Ryan Norton wxprojects@comcast.net wrote:
On Monday, September 12, 2005, at 11:54 AM, uninvited@nerstrand.net wrote:
So would a policy that states, specifically, that images taken from present-day news sources or wire services are against Wikipedia policy, regardless of the fair use case that the uploader thinks may apply.
How do you define "present day"? The only case for that and say, 10 years ago, is that doing it now might cause more bad press... but if you're going to do this you may as well just prohibit it altogether.
I would think that in a case like this "present day" would apply to images that are still current, for which there is still significant demand from the wire services. In other words, if a lot of people are still buying the images from the wire services, if these images are still bringing traffic to news sites that pay for them, then we should probably not be using them and calling it "fair use" - with the obvious exception of things like a screen-shot of a news site in a story about that news site (say, for example, the NYTimes mistakenly posted Cheney's obituary tomorrow, we should be able to use a screen shot of their web site, which might happen to include other images, and call it fair use).
Ian
On 9/12/05, uninvited@nerstrand.net uninvited@nerstrand.net wrote:
I have been trying to form policy by working through issues on Wikipedia, but it is becoming clear that (a) the general opposition to deletion of anything, (b) the inability to undelete images, and (c) the lack of understanding of the nuances of U.S. copyright law are working together to prevent any useful work from being done by consensus. I believe that leadership, and careful involvement of counsel, will be necessary to adopt useful policy.
Where exactly have you been trying to form this policy by working through the issues? So far all I've you do is rewrite [[Wikipedia:Fair use]], which was on the whole a good thing. (I thought there were a few problems with it, which I posted on the talk page for half a week before just changing the text myself since nobody responded one way or another. Nobody has yet to respond, one way or another.)
I could be wrong, but it seems like you've nominated a whole single image for deletion along these lines in the last two weeks. If you think an image is a copyright infringement -- and doesn't qualify for fair use -- why not tag it as such and mark it for deletion? I'd be happy to chime in against people who blatantly don't understand the legal issues in question.
You added your name to [[Wikipedia:Wikiproject Fair use]], which has been quite active in rewriting fair use tags (and deleting problematic ones), and is on the cusp of having a workable system for users to label suspicious/disputed/approved fair use claims.
If you'd like to participate in the discussion, please do. There are a number of people who are trying to draw up guidelines and feasible plans. I'm not trying to sound snarky, but you're clearly aware of our project, so I'm taking your complaining to the list as being some sort of indication that you don't think it is in alignment with your goals or thinking. There's a list of people on the page who have all expressed interest and probably wouldn't mind being contacted if you had some issue you wanted a lot of interested and informed opinions on.
After some time assessing things, I think a great deal of our fair use images are just fine. The vast majority of them are things like box art and movie posters and are low-res, used appropriately in articles, have no "free" replacements available, and don't deny anybody future profitability. At the moment we've been mostly concentrating on sorting these sorts of things out so that it's easy to see get to the more problematic cases. These things take time, of course, and the efforts of volunteers -- hence a coordinating project.
FF