In a message dated 2/23/2008 9:43:03 P.M. Pacific Standard Time, tonysidaway@gmail.com writes:
A book cover is not free unless it's specifically licensed as such by the copyright owner. If that's what you think of as tendentious, it's hardly going to surprise anyone if you describe a lot of the tagging as tendentious. "Free" does NOT mean "we can probably get away with using this here under fair use", >>
----------------------------------------------------- And no one has ever implied that a book cover is free use. However, imho, it is *fair use*. However, some editors want to eliminate any fair use entirely from the project. That to me is not in the best interests of the project.
If, in a biography of Patti Smith, we have no free images of Patti Smith, but we have a book cover of her biography writen by John Brown or whatever, and that book cover, is in fact, a photograph of Patti Smith, we can and should use it in the article. That photograph enhances the project, harms no one, and is fair use. Rejecting it for bureaucratic reasons, making the *rule* more important than the participants, is not in the best interests of the project. I'm not suggesting we have a rule for not using book covers. I'm suggesting that those people who interpret our policy to state that, are harming the project.
Some editors place the rules as gods over the community, without realizing that it is the community which made the rules. Some editors place such a high reliance in their personal interpretations of general policy, to fit specific situations, that they cannot comprehend how harmful their actions are to the project, when they create such a level of internal discord, and when the end-result denigrates the project without creating any enhanced value.
The removal of all fair use photographs does nothing useful for the project. It does however harm it, by removing useful illustrations from articles that could use them, replacing their removal with a vacancy filled by nothing. That isn't progress.
Will Johnson
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On 24/02/2008, WJhonson@aol.com WJhonson@aol.com wrote:
If, in a biography of Patti Smith, we have no free images of Patti Smith, but we have a book cover of her biography writen by John Brown or whatever, and that book cover, is in fact, a photograph of Patti Smith, we can and should use it in the article. That photograph enhances the project, harms no one, and is fair use. Rejecting it for bureaucratic reasons, making the *rule* more important than the participants, is not in the best interests of the project. I'm not suggesting we have a rule for not using book covers. I'm suggesting that those people who interpret our policy to state that, are harming the project.
How exactly would you defend that under the doctrine of fair use? I really can't see a way to do it.
Some editors place the rules as gods over the community, without realizing that it is the community which made the rules. Some editors place such a high reliance in their personal interpretations of general policy, to fit specific situations, that they cannot comprehend how harmful their actions are to the project, when they create such a level of internal discord, and when the end-result denigrates the project without creating any enhanced value.
Our copyright policy was for the most part put together by people who have at least a passing knowledge of copyright law. So fair you have failed to show that you do.
The removal of all fair use photographs does nothing useful for the project.
The project is to make a free encyclopedia.
It does however harm it, by removing useful illustrations from articles that could use them,
So far for your chosen example this does not appear to be true.
replacing their removal with a vacancy filled by nothing. That isn't progress.
Will Johnson
Experience suggests that nothing is more likely to be replaced by a free image than an image with a really really weak fair use claim.
WJhonson@aol.com schreef:
I'm not suggesting we have a rule for not using book covers. I'm suggesting that those people who interpret our policy to state that, are harming the project.
We *do* have a rule that says exactly that; it's not a matter of interpretation. Have you read [[Wikipedia:Non-free content]]? That complete page, including the guideline examples, is policy.
You may think that that rule is harming the project; evidently, other people think it isn't.
Some editors place the rules as gods over the community, without realizing that it is the community which made the rules.
No, in this case, it wasn't the community, it was the Foundation, and before the board resolution it was Jimbo who stated that the encyclopedia had to be free. This is one policy that cannot be changed by the community.
And a considerable part of the community doesn't want to change it, either. Some people think we should write an encyclopedia that happens to be free; other people think we should write a Free encyclopedia. This division in opinion about how large a part of our mission the freedom of the encyclopedia is, has caused a lot of discussion in the past, and this one about BCB is a part of that.
Unfortunately for some, these discussions will -- as I said -- change nothing, as the decision has come from above, like the ten commandments to Moses.
Eugene
On 2/24/08, WJhonson@aol.com WJhonson@aol.com wrote:
And no one has ever implied that a book cover is free use. However, imho, it is *fair use*.
You appear to be confused. A work itself cannot be "a fair use". Certain uses of a work can be fair uses. This is why the nature and the context of the use are important.
However, some editors want to eliminate any fair use entirely from the project. That to me is not in the best interests of the project.
As many have observed, your real beef thus appears to be with the Foundation's policies and the free content nature of the Wikimedia projects. You have, as always, the right to fork off a copy of Wikipedia and start your own project. Wikipedia, meanwhile, will remain the *free* encyclopaedia.
-- Stephen Bain stephen.bain@gmail.com
On Sun, Feb 24, 2008 at 6:32 AM, Stephen Bain stephen.bain@gmail.com wrote:
On 2/24/08, WJhonson@aol.com WJhonson@aol.com wrote:
And no one has ever implied that a book cover is free use. However, imho, it is *fair use*.
You appear to be confused. A work itself cannot be "a fair use". Certain uses of a work can be fair uses. This is why the nature and the context of the use are important.
It's clear that this refers to the context of a certain article.
However, some editors want to eliminate any fair use entirely from the project. That to me is not in the best interests of the project.
As many have observed, your real beef thus appears to be with the Foundation's policies and the free content nature of the Wikimedia projects. You have, as always, the right to fork off a copy of Wikipedia and start your own project. Wikipedia, meanwhile, will remain the *free* encyclopaedia.
-- Stephen Bain stephen.bain@gmail.com
It's also clear that Wikipedia's fully capable of being a free encyclopaedia project with some insertions of text & media that rely upon the fair use (or fair dealings, for instance in my case) doctrine. The foundation specifically enables projects to develop a policy to cover how this is done - which "implies" the foundation approves of doing this.
It's a completely baseless argument to rely upon "fair use text & media inhibit downstream reuse" - while it's true that someone modifying the content for downstream reuse will need to watch the applicability of the fair use text/media, so do things like libel laws & artists' moral rights; we simply cannot hope to ensure that downstream reusers can mindlessly modify and reuse content - those modifying the content will always need to check whether they're modified content will be legal.
Cheers WilyD