On 9/11/07, Daniel R. Tobias <dan(a)tobias.name> wrote:
On 11 Sep 2007 at 13:29:21 +0100, "David Gerard" <dgerard(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
And I didn't note that "case by
case" is actually required for
justifying fair use. If the "abuse" is removing a nonfree image, I
generally find myself almost entirely unable to manifest two hoots.
It can be kind of frustrating, though, to try to get what one feels
is justified fair use images into the encyclopedia in the face of the
strong ideological opposition from those who want a totally purist
site in the area of copyright license. The purists won in many
language Wikipedias, such as German, but couldn't get such an
outright victory in English, so they took the next best step for them
of continually tossing up hoops for image uploaders to jump through.
Since I uploaded quite a few top-level-domain registry logos in the
course of populating the infoboxes for TLDs (I created the TLD
infobox and spent about two years gradually getting them in place in
all the TLDs, including the 200-plus country code domains), and did
most of this uploading in the more cavalier days when image licensing
wasn't as vigorously policed as it is now, I'm faced now with a
steady stream of ominous talk-page notices posted by bots threatening
to remove this or that image unless I jump through whichever hoop
they're tossing now, like providing a source or a rationale or a
haiku.
I agree that's frustrating, and despite being a supporter of stronger
emphasis on the free in "free encyclopaedia", it still annoys me to receive
such notices. If you ask me, we have failed with these hoops we make people
jump through.
We should be making people appreciate what it means to be free - that
certain uses of copyrighted material are not compatible with our intention
to build a free encyclopaedia; if they do not contribute to the free aspect,
and minimally (if at all) to the encyclopaedia, they do not belong. Logos
and other such identification material are important, as are certain
noteworthy depictions of events, or depictions of noteworthy events.
But if the image used is not remarkable, and does not add any significant
information to the article (does a generic still of footage of Islamic
insurgents taken from a television network add anything to an article on
Islamic insurgents? Re-enactments, or stills of noteworthy footage such as
videos released by Islamic insurgent groups add to the encyclopedic value of
the article, but not generic copyrighted images), it ought to be removed.
Of course, applying this principle is not easy if you do it mechanically
because there are so many grey areas and borderline cases. You need to
appreciate the spirit we are founded on - does it add anything to the
encyclopaedia, while having minimal impact on the free aspect (minimal being
relative to the encyclopedic value of the copyrighted content)? We wouldn't
repost portions of a transcript from an episode of Lost just because we
legally can, so why should we have a generic still for every Lost episode on
lists of Lost episodes?
Even more depressing is that people are not appreciating why we need a fair
use rationale. IANAL, but I'm fairly confident that in most cases, a fair
use rationale does not add much legally and certainly not libre-ly to the
value of copyrighted content. It's become just another hoop to jump through
- people don't think about why we need rationales. They've become an end in
themselves, rather than a means to an end.
Perhaps I'm setting my sights too high, but it ticks me off a little that
we're losing sight of what it means to be a free encyclopaedia, with some
people overemphasising the encyclopaedia and others overemphasising the
free. We need both to be Wikipedia.
Johnleemk